try. Antwerp became the world's great centre of commerce and finance. The cloth industry was strengthened by the introduction of factory methods, the linen industry fully developed. While furthering this progress, Charles used it to give political influence in the cities of the Low Countries to the progressive classes who were loyal to himself. Judged by its results, Charles' economic policy was successful in the Netherlands, but it succeeded only indifferently in Spain, where industrial progress, though much greater during this reign than it had been, was generally slow and never so marked as to produce great political changes. In Spain the opposition to Charles' policies was found in the Cortes and in the city governments, but still more among the lesser nobility, the Hidalgueria, who resisted all agricultural progress as well as the emperor's external policy. Most of the Castilians remained under Charles' rule the same frugal, contented, rustic people as before, in marked contrast to the people of the Netherlands. Yet by industrial improvement and political training, Charles was able to make of Spain the instrument by which his son Philip, in the time of the counter-Reformation, brought effective aid to the Catholics of Europe, and under the unfavourable circumstances this result is as remarkable as the prosperity which the Netherlands attained under his rule. No less noteworthy were his services to the great empire rapidly springing up in America. Economical considerations being, in the early period of colonization, the most important, the management of American affairs was confided to a bureau of commerce (casa de contratacion) in Seville; but at the same time he established in Spain a special political "Council of the Indies". In the colonies two viceroyalties and twenty-nine governments, four archbishoprics, and twenty-four bishoprics were gradually organized. Already of all those great problems had arisen which still vex colonia...
