It may look like wandering from the main topic of discussion to devote a chapter to an institution which has ceased to exist for forty years. But no one can fully comprehend the social and political character of the diverse and conflicting nationalities and discordant elements that for three hundred years constituted the Spanish empire without fully understanding the character and workings of the Inquisition, which, from "the Council of the Supreme" in Spain, extended, with its complicated ramifications, through all the provinces, and penetrated every social organization in Europe and America, and even to the most distant East India possessions, binding all the several parts together as the nervous system does the parts of the human body; or rather by external folds, as the anaconda does its victim. The Inquisition was emphatically the nervous system of the Spanish monarchy. From the time of Philip II. to the last of her kings, Spain had but one monarch that could have escaped a lunatic asylum on a commission ad inquirendo, and not a single royal family in all that time that had not at least one judicially declared idiot in the household; and more than once it was the regular successor to the throne. And yet this ingeniously contrived craft of priests held all most firmly together, and made it capable of resisting every outside pressure until the French imperial armies entered Madrid.
When French gunpowder was applied to the Holy Office, the Spanish empire lost its nationality, and its different parts fell to pieces like a rope of sand, and revealed to the world the sad truth that the Spanish race, whether in the Peninsula or in the colonies, was now incapable of self-government. The Inquisition had consumed its powers of vitality. So long accustomed to submit to and lean upon despotic authority, its various nationalities had lost the power of self-support. Spain, from the earliest historical periods, had ever been the victim of foreign colonial despotisms or imported tyrants until Philip II., under whom the Inquisition becoming firmly established, it thenceforward continued a Catholic province of the Roman Church, until Rome and the Papal Spanish empire fell together by the hands of Napoleon. From that time