Many of Queen Isabel’s contemporaries remark her intolerance of crime and disorder, and a few of the younger generation who had grown to manhood in the atmosphere of peace she had established, condemn her justice as excessive. By modern standards it is undoubtedly barbarous; but long centuries of anarchy had bred a spirit of lust and brutality little above the barbarian level, and only drastic measures could hope to cure so deep-rooted an evil. Isabel herself, throughout her childhood, had been a forced witness of her brother’s policy of “sprinkling rose-water on rebellion” instead of employing the surgeon’s knife; and her strength of character despised the weakness, that under the pretext of humanity made life impossible for nine-tenths of the population. It is her great achievement that she raised the crown, the mediæval symbol of national justice, from the political squalor into which seventy years of mingled misfortune and incapacity had thrown it, and that she set it on a pedestal so lofty, that even the haughtiest Castilian need not be ashamed to bow the knee in reverence. By this substitution of a strong government for a weak, of impartiality for favouritism, she secured peace at home and thus laid a firm foundation for Ferdinand’s ambitious foreign policy, and the establishment of Spain as the first nation in Europe. It is perhaps difficult to apportion exactly the respective shares of Isabel and her husband in the administrative measures of their reign; for their unanimity of aim and action was in keeping with their motto _tanto monta_,—“the one as much as the other.” Yet in this connection it is necessary to realize the contrast between the two kingdoms. Aragon, with its three divisions of Aragon proper, Valencia, and the Principality of Catalonia, measured in all scarcely a quarter of the territory of its western neighbour. Moreover the spirit of the people and the democratic character of its laws rendered it a soil peculiarly ill-suited for the growth of the royal prerogative. Thus, in spite of the sovereigns’ best endeavours, it stubbornly withstood their centralizing policy, and the main burden of taxation and governmental measures fell on Castile. The latter, “the corona” or “big crown,” in contradistinction to the “coronilla” or “little crown” of Aragon, continued throughout the Queen’s lifetime to look on her husband as more or less of a foreigner; and all the many documents signed “Yo, El Rey” could not weigh with a true Castilian against Isabel’s single “Yo, La Reina.” It is she, who, when “Los Reyes” are not mentioned together, is hailed to-day in Spain as the chief representative of national grandeur, just as “castellano,” the speech of the larger kingdom, has become synonymous with our term “Spanish.”