With the death of Isabella, which occurred at this time, the Moriscoes were relieved from the persecution of a vindictive and persevering enemy. The permanent elimination of her influence from the politics of the Peninsula did not, however, improve the condition of the recent victims of her fiery and unrelenting zeal. The system by which she governed; the infamous maxims which guided her conduct in the relations existing between sovereign and subject; the shameless violation of treaties; the audacious usurpations of the clergy; the prejudices engendered by years of oppression, were perpetuated by her successors, and adopted by their ministers as an essential part of the policy of the crown. The reverence with which her memory is regarded is to be attributed, not so much to the greatness of her abilities, eminent as they were, but to their misapplication; not to the military achievements of her armies, but to the sanguinary revenge they inflicted upon vanquished enemies; not to the blessings of a wise, a just, and a stable government,--the most substantial foundation upon which the fame of a monarch can be erected,--but to the inauguration of measures which eventually purged the kingdom of misbelievers, who were the source of its material wealth and of its commercial and agricultural prosperity. A princess who could deliberately repudiate the obligations of national honor can scarcely be regarded in the light of a public benefactor. The patroness of the Inquisition has but a slender claim to the admiration of posterity. The popularity of Isabella is based upon the fact that she was the representative of contemporaneous popular sentiment. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries no proceeding was so meritorious as the torture of heretics. All questions of political expediency were rigidly subordinated to the claims of what was universally regarded as a paramount religious duty. The progressive decadence of Spanish power dates from its very establishment, and is directly traceable to the incessant intervention of ecclesiastical authority in civil affairs, and to the awful consequences resulting from the unlimited application of the atrocious principle that national faith and public honor must be always sacrificed to the interests of the Roman Catholic religion.