Those provisions of the edict which affected a show of kindness to the Jews were contrived so artfully as to be nearly nugatory. As they were excluded from the use of gold and silver, the only medium for representing their property was bills of exchange. But commerce was too limited and imperfect to allow of these being promptly obtained to any very considerable, much less to the enormous amount required in the present instance. It was impossible, moreover, to negotiate a sale of their effects under existing circumstances, since the market was soon glutted with commodities; and few would be found willing to give anything like an equivalent for what, if not disposed of within the prescribed term, the proprietors must relinquish at any rate. So deplorable, indeed, was the sacrifice of property that a chronicler of the day mentions that he had seen a house exchanged for an ass, and a vineyard for a suit of clothes! Yet there were found but very few, when the day of departure arrived, who were not prepared to abandon their country rather than their religion. This extraordinary act of self-devotion by a whole people for conscience’ sake may be thought to merit other epithets than those of “perfidy, incredulity, and stiff-necked obstinacy,” with which the worthy curate of Los Palacios,[h] in the charitable feeling of that day, has seen fit to stigmatise it. When the period of departure arrived, all the principal routes through the country might be seen swarming with emigrants, old and young, the sick and the helpless, men, women, and children, mingled promiscuously together, some mounted on horses or mules, but far the greater part undertaking their painful pilgrimage on foot. The sight of so much misery touched even the Spaniards with pity, though none might succour them; for the grand inquisitor, Torquemada, enforced the ordinance to that effect by denouncing heavy ecclesiastical censures on all who should presume to violate it. Much the largest division, amounting according to some estimates to eighty thousand souls, passed into Portugal; whose monarch, João [John] II, dispensed with his scruples of conscience so far as to give them a free passage through his dominions on their way to Africa, in consideration of a tax of a _cruzado_ a head. He is even said to have silenced his scruples so far as to allow certain ingenious artisans to establish themselves permanently in the kingdom.