To carry out this urgently-required purification, he implored the Queen to establish the Inquisition.[49] There was a speciousness, and even a justice, in his arguments which must have impressed that pious lady. But her piety, intense as it was, did not carry her to the lengths required of her by her priestly counsellor. The balance of her splendid mind was singularly true. She perceived that here was matter that called for a remedy; but she perceived also the fanaticism inspiring the friar who stood before her, and realized how his fanaticism must exaggerate the evil. She was aware also of the extreme malevolence of which the New-Christians were the object. By their conversion they might have deflected the religious hostility of the Castilians; but the more deeply-rooted racial antagonism remained. It not only remained, but it was quickened by the envy which these New-Christians were exciting. The energy and intelligence inherent in men of their race were serving them now, as they had served them before, to their undoing. There were no offices of eminence in which New-Christians were not to be found; there were none in which they did not outnumber the Old-Christians--the pure-blooded Castilians. This the Queen knew, for she was herself surrounded by converts and the descendants of converts. Several of her counsellors, her three secretaries--one of whom was that chronicler, Pulgar, whose record of the situation has been quoted--and her very treasurer were all New-Christians.[50] These men Isabella knew intimately, and esteemed. Judging the New-Christians generally by those in her immediate service, she was naturally led to discount Ojeda’s imputations against them. She perceived the source of these imputations, and she must have taken into consideration the ineradicable bitterness of the popular feeling against Jews and the intensity of a prejudice which extended--as we have said--to the New-Christians to such an extent that they continued to be known as “Judios,” notwithstanding their conversion, so that often in contemporary chronicles it is difficult to determine to which class the writer is referring. We have said that, in spite of conversions, the racial hostility remained. The Christian attitude towards the Hebrew had not changed in the hundred years that were sped since, under the incitings of the Archdeacon of Ecija, the mob had risen up and massacred them. They were the descendants of the crucifiers always. A vestige of this feeling lingers to this day in the peninsula. In the vocabulary of the Portuguese lower orders, and even of the indifferently educated, there is no such word as “cruel.” “Jew” is the term that has entirely usurped its functions, and as an injunction against cruelty to man or beast, “Don’t be a Jew!” (_Não seja judeu!_) is still the only phrase.