Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. III.djvu/491

463 REVIEW OF THEIR ADMINISTRATION. 463 close of the sixteenth, for the desponding language chapter of cortes shows that the work of decay and depop- ~ 1— ulation had then already begun. ^^ Tt can only be found in the first half of that century, in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, and that of their succes- sor Charles the Fifth ; in which last, the state, under the strong impulse it had received, was car- ried onward in the career of prosperity, in spite of the ignorance and mismanagement of those who guided it. There is no country which has been guilty of Economical J c> J policy. such wild experiments, or has showed, on the whole, such profound ignorance of the true principles of economical science, as Spain under the sceptre of the family of Austria. And, as it is not always easy to discriminate between their acts and those of Ferdinand and Isabella, under whom the germs of much of the subsequent legislation may be said to have been planted, this circumstance has brought undeserved discredit on the government of the latter. Undeserved, because laws, mischievous in their eventual operation, were not always so at the time for which they were originally devised ; not to add, that what was intrinsically bad, has been aggravated ten fold under the blind legislation of their successors. ^^ It is also true, that many of the population of the kingdom, at this With every allowance, it infers an time, had dwindled to 6,000,000. alarming decline in the prosperity See Laborde, (Itintraire, torn. vi. of the nation, pp. 125, 143, ed. 1830,) who seems 89 One has only to read, for an to have better foundation for this evidence of this, the lib. 6, tit. 18, census than for most of those in his of the " Nueva Recopilacion," on table. " cosas prohibidas"; the laws on 88 See the unequivocal language gilding and plating, lib. 5, tit. 24 ; of cortes, under Philip 11. (supra.) on apparel and luxury, lib. 7, tit.