"Anything is better," he says, "than to burden more heavily these poor unhappy vassals of Castile, who, by their love, their efforts, and their sufferings have made us masters of the rest of what we possess, and still preserve it for us, as the head and part principal of our commonwealth. I would far rather take burdens from these poor people than impose further sacrifices upon them, and when I think of what they have to pay, and also the {170} trouble and annoyance they have to submit to in the collection of it, in good truth I would rather beg for charity from door to door, if I could, to provide for the funds necessary for the national defence, than deal so harshly with such vassals as these.... I grieve in my very soul to see such good subjects suffer so much from the faults of my ministers. If my own life-blood would remedy it I would cheerfully give it. And yet, though you (the Council of Castile) know how this cuts me to the heart, and though I reproach you, you propose no remedy.... I tried the Cortes of Aragon, running, as you well know, serious risk, and incurring great trouble and inconvenience, solely for the purpose of alleviating the pressure upon these Castilian subjects, and I am directing my efforts in the same way with my other realms, so that some day I hope we may be able to lighten the taxes in Castile. God knows, I yearn for the coming of that day more than to conquer Constantinople." [Sidenote: Philip's life tragedy] We shall see as time goes on that this attitude is the one natural to Philip through all the troubles which gathered blacker and blacker, as the evil seed sown by him and Olivares grew and ripened. He himself, acting conscientiously and under divine inspiration, was never wrong in the measures he adopted. If suffering and adversity came, they always came either from the wiles of the evil one, or for some wise inscrutable purpose of God. They were never at this time a consequence of any want of wisdom or prescience of his. His heart bled, as we see by his own passionate words quoted above, for the misery of his subjects, but it never seemed {171} through his life to occur to him that the way to remedy it was to abandon an untenable position in his foreign relations, and devote his energies to the concentration of national resources for the promotion of productive industry and interior economy.