«QR. ~

choose between the lack of honor among kings and the lack
of honor among priests. The plot was discovered, and the
Church and the monarchy sank still lower in the judgment
of Spain’s intellectual leaders. r

And now a hundred thousand troops were brought from
France by the King and his priestly advisors and support-
ers, and Spanish Democrats were executed and butchered
in blind ferocity. Not less than ‘forty-four thousand of them
were imprisoned, and a hundred thousand of them were
exiled and ruined. Maj or Hufne, one of the highest authori-
ties on Spanish History, tells" us in his “Modern Spain” that
“there was neither justice nor mercy in the government of
the besotted churchmen who surrounded the king.”

Canon Saez, now the most influential priest in Spain,
was the head of the government and the director of the
persecution mania against the nation’s political progress-
ives. The Bishop of Osuma organized a society called “The
Exterminating Angel,” a monstrous ecclesiastical organi-
zationwhich spread all over Spain and which instigated
ignorant peasants and criminals to murder, loot, rape and
burn. The Jesuits, feeling that the King was not going far
enough in the protection of the Church, organized an insti-
tution known as “The Federation of Pure Royalists,” and
this organization murdered more thousands ‘of Democrats,
filled jails, and had tens of thousands exiled to Spain’s dread-
ful penal colonies. The object of these movements was to
terrify the liberal spirits of Spain into remaining absolutely
under the control of the monarchy and the Church.

And now came the Carlist War, a war deliberately cre-

ated by the Catholic Church in the interest of the Church

and against the legitimate sovereign. During the twelve
years’ period of war and persecution no less than fifty thou-
sand Spanish liberals, Democrats, were executed, or mur-
dered, or diedin foul prisons, or in the galleys, or in Spain’s
wicked penal colonies.

After the failure of the Church-m~ade Carlist War there
was another revolution in which the Democrats again came
to power. But again they made no reprisals against the

brutal and corrupt clergy and royalist politicians. "However

false andgcfrueltheir opponents had been, the economic and
religious liberals had no desire, now that they were in
power, to crush them. On sixdifferent occasions during
the Nineteenth Century the Spanish Democrats, as a result
of revolutibns, came into power, and after each one of those
victories no effort was made to imprison or maim or kill
the enemies of Spain’s progressive movements.

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