"In banishing the Jews from her territory, Spain, then acted consistently; her conduct was logically just, but according to that pitiless logic which ruins States in order to save a principle. From that period, therefore, a new era begins for Castile. Until then she had been divided from the rest of Europe only by her position; foreign, without being hostile, to the ideas of the continent, she had not begun to wage war with those ideas; but the establishment of the Inquisition is the first step in the career in which she can never stop." [Saint Hilaire, vol. 6, p. 52.]
"It required," says M. Sismondi, "about one generation to accustom the Spaniards to the sanguinary proceedings of the Inquisition, and to fanaticise the people. This work, dictated by an infernal policy, was scarcely accomplished, when Charles the Fifth began his reign. It was probably the fatal spectacle of the auto-dä-fe that imparted to the Spanish soldiers their ferocity, so remarkable during the whole of that period, which before that time was so foreign to the national character." [Sismondi, vol. 3, p. 265.] Who, employing these instruments, depopulated Spain? THE INQUISITION. "To calculate," says Liorente, secretary to the Holy office, "the number of victims of the Inquisition were to give palpable proof of the most powerful and active causes of the depopulation of Spain; for, if to several millions of inhabitants of which the Inquisitorial system has deprived this kingdom by the total expulsion of the Jews, the conquered Moors and the baptized Moorish, we add about 500,000 families entirely destroyed by the executions of the Holy (?) office, it will be proved beyond a doubt that had it not been for this tribunal, and the influence of its maxims, Spain would possess 12,000,000 souls above her present population, supposed to amount to 11,000,000." [Liorente, vol. 4, p. 242.]
"The Inquisition ruined and branded with infamy more than 340,000 persons, whose disgrace was reflected on their families, and who bequeathed only opprobrium and misery to their children. Add to these more than 100,000 families who emigrated in order to escape from the blood-thirsty tribunal, and it will be seen that the Inquisition has been the most active instrument of the ruin of Spain. But the most disastrous of all the acts which it occasioned was the expulsion of the Moors. If we add to those who were banished from Spain the countless numbers who perished in the insurrection of the sixteenth century, and the 800,000 Jews who left the kingdom, it will be seen that the country lost in the course of a hundred and twenty years about three millions of its most industrious inhabitants." [Weiss, vol. 2, pp. 60, 61.]