The Goths seem to have been little more than armed settlers in the country. Marriage between them and the Iberians was forbidden by their laws, and the traces of their occupation are singularly few: not a single inscription or book of Gothic origin remains, and it seems doubtful if any trace of the language can be found in Castilian or any of its dialects. It is strange, if this be true, that there should be so strong a belief in the influence of Gothic blood in the race. In all these wars and rumours of war the men of the hardy North remained practically unconquered. The last to submit to the Roman, the first to throw off the yoke of the Moor, the Basques and Asturians appear to be the representatives of the old inhabitants of Spain, who never settled down under the sway of the invader or acquiesced in foreign rule. Cicero mentions a Spanish tongue which was unintelligible to the Romans; was this Basque, which is equally so now to the rest of Spain, and which, if you believe the modern Castilian, the devil himself has never been able to master? The history of Spain is one to make the heart ache. Some evil influence, some malign destiny, seems ever to have brought disaster where her people looked for progress or happiness. Her golden age was just in the short epoch when Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon reigned and ruled over the united kingdoms: both were patriotic, both clever, and absolutely at one in their policy. It is almost impossible to us who can look back on the long records, almost always sad and disastrous, not to doubt whether in giving a new world "to Castile and Aragon," Cristobal Colon did not impose a burden on the country of his adoption which she was unable to bear, and which became, in the hands of the successors of her _muy Españoles y muy Católicos_ kings, a curse instead of a blessing. Certain it is that Spain was not sufficiently advanced in political economy to understand or cope with the enormous changes which this opening up of a new world brought about. The sudden increase of wealth without labour, of reward for mere adventure, slew in its infancy any impulse there might have been to carry on the splendid manufactures and enlightened agriculture of the Moors; trade became a disgrace, and the fallacious idea that bringing gold and silver into a country could make it rich and prosperous ate like a canker into the industrial heart of the people, and with absolute certainty threw them backward in the race of civilisation.