It must at the same time be borne in mind that this censorship was not imposed upon Spain by an authority from without. The power of Rome was never applied, either in regard to literature or to other matters controlled by the Church, with greater strenuousness or severity in Spain than in France or in Italy itself. In fact, whether from choice or from necessity, the direction of the affairs of the Church of Spain, and the regulation of the discipline of its members, were left by the Papacy to be controlled by the Spanish ecclesiastics themselves. The Inquisition, as organised in Spain, was the creation of Spaniards and, with hardly an exception, the inquisitors who during the centuries in question carried on its work were Spanish in birth and in training. The policy of placing in the hands of the Inquisition the creation and the administration of a system of censorship of literature, and the responsibility for the preparation of the Indexes, is one for which the rulers of the kingdom, acting naturally under the influence of their spiritual advisers, must be held directly responsible. The ecclesiastics succeeded in convincing not one but successive Kings of Spain that for the safety and welfare of the community literature and education, higher as well as elementary, must be placed under the supervision of the Church. A further responsibility, however, for this abandonment to ecclesiastical control of the intellectual life of the community must rest with the people themselves. If the literary productions of Spain were restricted and hampered to the point of crushing out altogether, if the men of active minds were banished or made dumb, if the business of the printer-publishers was brought to a close, and if the few enterprising readers who, notwithstanding the instructions of their confessors, might still venture to interest themselves in current literature, were obliged to depend for their supplies upon the chance of securing copies of the prohibited books smuggled in with bales of merchandise, it was because the people of Spain had decided for themselves that such methods were necessary for their spiritual safety. It may well be a matter of surprise that, under the conditions of censorship obtaining during the 16th and 17th centuries, it should have been possible to bring into existence any such national literature as that which is described by Ticknor and other historians. With a censorship which, in form at least, differed very little in the several great Catholic States of Europe, the fact that the Spaniards were willing to accept and to give obedience to a series of regulations, of penalties, and of prohibitions such as it proved to be impossible to enforce in Italy, in France, or in Germany, is evidence of some special quality in the Spanish nature.