Having looted Antwerp, the treasure chest of Belgium, the Spaniards set up the Inquisition as an organized means of securing property. It is a strange fact that the Spaniard has excelled in cruelty as other nations have excelled in art or science or invention. Spain's cruelty to the Moors and the rich Jews forms one of the blackest chapters in history. Inquisitors became fiends. Moors were starved, tortured, burned, flung in wells, Jewish bankers had their tongues thrust through little iron rings; then the end of the tongue was seared that it might swell, and the banker was led by a string in the ring through the streets of the city. The women and the children were put on rafts that were pushed out into the Mediterranean Sea. When the swollen corpses drifted ashore, the plague broke out, and when that black plague spread over Spain it seemed like the justice of outraged nature. The expulsion of the Moors was one of the deadliest blows ever struck at science, commerce, art and literature. The historian tracks Spain across the continents by a trail of blood. Wherever Spain's hand has fallen it has paralyzed. From the days of Cortez, wherever her captains have given a pledge, the tongue that spake has been mildewed with lies and treachery. The wildest beasts are not in the jungle; man is the lion that rends, man is the leopard that tears, man's hate is the serpent that poisons, and the Spaniard entered Belgium to turn a garden into a wilderness. Within one year, 1568, Antwerp, that began with 125,000 people, ended it with 50,000. Many multitudes were put to death by the sword and stake, but many, many thousands fled to England, to begin anew their lives as manufacturers and mariners; and for years Belgium was one quaking peril, an inferno, whose torturers were Spaniards. The visitor in Antwerp is still shown the rack upon which they stretched the merchants that they might yield up their hidden gold. The Painted Lady may be seen. Opening her arms, she embraces the victim. The Spaniard, with his spear, forced the merchant into the deadly embrace. As the iron arms concealed in velvet folded together, one spike passed through each eye, another through the mouth, another through the heart. The Painted Lady's lips were poisoned, so that a kiss was fatal. The dungeon whose sides were forced together by screws, so that each day the victim saw his cell growing less and less, and knew that soon he would be crushed to death, was another instrument of torture. Literally thousands of innocent men and women were burned alive in the market place.
There is no more piteous tragedy in history than the story of the decline and ruin of this superbly prosperous, literary and artistic country, and yet out of the ashes came new courage. Burned, broken, the Belgians and the Dutch were not beaten. Pushed at last into Holland, where they united their fortunes with the Dutch, they cut the dykes of Holland, and let in the ocean, and clinging to the dykes with their finger tips, fought their way back to the land; but no sooner had the last of the Spaniards gone than out of their rags and poverty they founded a university as a monument to the providence of God in delivering them out of the hands of their enemies. For, the Sixteenth Century, in the form of a brave knight, wears little Belgium and Holland like a red rose upon his heart.
THE DEATH OF EGMONT
