to note only traces of receptive thought. Spain under Bourbon rule,
as already noted, experienced an administrative renascence. Such men
as Count Aranda (1718-99) and Aszo y del Rio (1742-1814) wrought to
cut the claws of the Inquisition and to put down the Jesuits; but not
yet, after the long work of destruction accomplished by the Church in
the past, could Spain produce a fresh literature of any far-reaching
power. When Aranda was about to be appointed in 1766, his friends
the French Encyclopédistes prematurely proclaimed their exultation
in the reforms he was to accomplish; and he sadly protested that they
had thereby limited his possibilities. [1601] Nonetheless he wrought
much, the power of the Inquisition in Spain being already on the
wane. Dr. Joaquin Villanueva, one of the ecclesiastical statesmen who
took part in its suppression by the Cortes at Cadiz in 1813, tells how,
in his youth, under the reign of Charles III, it was a current saying
among the students at college that while the clever ones could rise to
important posts in the Church, or in the law, the blockheads would be
sure to find places in the Inquisition. [1602] It was of course still
powerful for social terrorism and minor persecution; but its power of
taking life was rapidly dwindling. Between 1746 and 1759 it had burned
only ten persons; from 1759 until 1781 it burned only four; thereafter
none, [1603] the last case having provoked protests which testified
to the moral change wrought in Europe by a generation of freethought.
In Spain too, as elsewhere, freethought had made way among the upper
classes; and in 1773 we find the Duke d'Alba (formerly Huescar),
ex-ambassador of Spain to France, subscribing eighty louis for a
statue to Voltaire. "Condemned to cultivate my reason in secret,"
he wrote to D'Alembert, "I see this opportunity to give a public
testimony of my gratitude to and admiration for the great man who
first showed me the way." [1604]