Of all the various systems of government that have been attempted on this earth, theocracy, or more properly hierocracy, is undoubtedly one of the very worst. And in all circumstances and conditions where the priest and the confessor usurp the authority that properly belongs to the magistrate and to the man, disaster is the inevitable result. From the death of Recared to the death of Roderic, the government of Spain was a theocracy, tempered by revolution. At the opening of the eighth century, Spain had no industry, no commerce, no arms. Not even letters had survived. For the Catholic church discouraged, if it did not actually prohibit, the study of polite literature. Virgil and Homer, Tacitus and Livy, were pagans and atheists, and their works were unprofitable and impious. The study of natural science or of medicine, the development of manufactures or of industry, the cultivation of the arts--these were equally unedifying to the devout Catholic. That sublime manifestation of “poetry in stone,” so strangely called Gothic architecture, is not only not Visigothic, but it was unknown in Spain for over four hundred years after the destruction of the Goths. And although the great province is still covered with the glorious remains of Roman constructive art, there is scarcely found trace or fragment of the rude architecture of the Visigoths to tell of their dominion in the peninsula. When Atawulf first crossed the Pyrenees at the head of the Visigoths, Latin was already the language of the Roman diocese. When Roderic threw away his crown on the banks of the Guadalete, Latin was still the language of the Visigothic kingdom. The Goth had been absorbed by the Roman. But a nation without a national language is doomed; a state without a state language is dead. Latin was the mother-tongue of the Romish church of Spain; but the Visigothic state was speechless. The kingdom, like Wamba, had been shorn and habited by the ecclesiastical power, and the kingdom, like the king, disappeared at the touch of the aggressor.[j] FOOTNOTES [1] Aristotle shows more credulity than philosophy when he makes the Phœnicians acquire at Tarifa (then Tartessus) a quantity of silver so prodigious that the ships could not carry it; and says that their anchors and commonest implements were of the same metal. The exaggeration only proves, perhaps, the abundance of silver in the country. [2] Polybius[e] says that he was murdered one night in his tent by a certain Gaul, in revenge of some private injury. The variation in the account is exceedingly slight. [3] For an interesting account of this siege, the reader is referred to Livy.[f] It is improbable, however, that the destruction was so universal as is affirmed. Polybius[g] says it was stormed and plundered; but he makes no mention of the conflagration or the self-immolation.