We shall now see this Spanish Catholicism at work; for three centuries, assisted by its worthy offspring, absolutism and the Inquisition, and at every ruin, at every crime you meet with, if you ask who has done this, the reply will assuredly be: the church of the Pope, the tyranny of the Catholic kings, the Inquisition of the priests. To convince yourselves of the fact, you need only put your questions and listen to the records of history, written not by us, but by men of talent and skill, who have long enjoyed unquestionable authority. The expulsion of the Jews and the Moors was the first fruit of the Catholic Inquisition. “Spain,” says M. Roseew Saint Hilaire, “exterminated them forever as poisonous plants from its soil, mortal to heresy. The Jews and the Moors left it in turn, carrying with them, the former trade, the latter agriculture, from this disinherited land, to which the New World, to repair so many losses, vainly bequeathed her sterile treasures. And let it not be said that Spain, in thus depriving herself of her most active citizens, was not aware of the extent of her loss. All her historians concur in the statement that in acting thus she sacrificed her temporal interests to her religious convictions, and all are at a loss for words to extol such a glorious sacrifice. “In banishing the Jews from her territory, Spain, then acted consistently; her conduct was logically just, but according to that pitiless logic which ruins States in order to save a principle. From that period, therefore, a new era begins for Castile. Until then she had been divided from the rest of Europe only by her position; foreign, without being hostile, to the ideas of the continent, she had not begun to wage war with those ideas; but the establishment of the Inquisition is the first step in the career in which she can never stop.” [Saint Hilaire, vol. 6, p. 52.]