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Rh For instance, the power which held the chief place in Europe at the opening of our own period, and long afterwards, was Spain. The internal policy of the Spanish monarchs, for which they were prepared to make the greatest sacrifices, was the control of religious opinion by the State. From the days of Ferdinand and Isabella onwards, they fought successfully to subordinate the Church and even ecclesiastical doctrine to themselves. It was for this that they established the Inquisition, that weapon used by the Spanish monarchy to regulate the religion of its subjects. It was for this too, that they drove out the dissenting Moriscoes with such slaughter that southern Spain has scarcely recovered it. They conquered Italy and put every indignity upon the Pope. Rather than not establish their religious views in the Flemish portion of their dominions, they forfeited the Netherlands. They abandoned their traditional friendship with England, and sent the Armada, when they realised that she barred the way. They sent their fire and their faggots across the ocean, the sworn tormentors of the world.

This characteristic feature at the opening of the modern period is equally observable in the history of France. There was one internal aim which the French government never abandoned from the time of Louis XI., at the close of the Middle Ages, to the reign of Louis XIV. and the eighteenth century; this was the mastery of