The Catholic sovereigns were not blind to this great future, and the legislation of their reign dealt largely with measures for fostering national industries. If such protection was often misguided it was like the over-anxious care of a mother, that may be as dangerous to a child’s welfare as the opposite vice of neglect. Each age has its theories of political economy and looks back with superior contempt on the failings of its predecessors. To twentieth-century eyes the economic outlook of the fifteenth is often exasperatingly foolish; yet in the days of Ferdinand and Isabel it appeared the height of wisdom, and efforts to put it into practice were eagerly demanded by the Cortes. Industry, it was felt, must be wrapped in the cotton-wool of a myriad restrictions; it must be artificially nourished and subjected to constant supervision and interference, or it would die of exposure to the rough-and-tumble of competition. That industrial death might be sometimes due to sheer weariness of life in intolerable fetters was a diagnosis of which no mediæval economist would ever have dreamt; and Ferdinand and Isabel firmly believed that their paternal legislation must prove a panacea for every public ill. [Illustration: GRANADA CATHEDRAL, ROYAL CHAPEL, TOMB OF FERDINAND AND ISABEL FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LACOSTE, MADRID ] Low prices demanded a cheap labour-market, therefore the obvious step was to fix a maximum wage for the worker, that he might not hope to exceed however worthy of his hire. Cheap labour must live, therefore a maximum price must be placed on corn that the wage-earner might be enabled to buy bread. Were grain grown for neighbourly love not a profit, this solution of an almost universal difficulty might have succeeded; but agriculture was never popular in Castile, and such arbitrary dealings tended to depress it still further.