beaten, together with their wives and children, and plundered. For upwards of a month, during September and October, A. D. 1731, these crimes were countenanced by the archbishop, who tortured the heads of the communes in prison whilst the villagers fell a prey to the licence of the soldiery. The peasantry, nevertheless, still continued stedfast in their faith, and the king of Prussia threatening to treat his Catholic subjects as Firmian treated his Protestant ones, Räll became alarmed lest the wretched peasant might in the end find a protector, (the emperor also being compelled on account of the Pragmatic Sanction to keep on good terms with the Protestant princes,) and came to the determination of expelling every Protestant from the country, as, at the same time, the most convenient method of contenting the pope, of extirpating heresy in the mountains, and of pacifying the king of Prussia, to whom the colonization of the wide uncultivated tracts in his territories was an object of no small importance. Recourse was, however, again had to every devisable method for the conversion of the peasantry, in order to guard, if possible, against the entire depopulation of the country by emigration. The most scandalous measures were resorted to, but in vain. The sentence of banishment was passed, and, although the laws of the empire assured free egress to all those emigrating on account of religion together with the whole of their property, they were totally disregarded by the archbishop and the imperial troops, and the peasantry were hunted down in every direction. Those at work in the fields were seized and carried to the frontier without being allowed to return home, even for the purpose of fetching their coats. Men were in this manner separated from their wives, parents from their children. They were collected in troops and exposed to the gibes of the priests, the soldiers, and the Catholic inhabitants, who gathered around them as they were hurried along. Besides being thus compelled to abandon their homes, they were deprived by the commissioners of any sums of money they happened to possess, and were merely granted a meagre and insufficient allowance for the expenses of the journey.

These cruelties were, however, unfelt when compared with the deprivation of their children. Upwards of a thousand children were torn from their parents. Some of the peasants, broken-hearted at this calamity, forgot their oath and begged

to be allowed to remain in order to avoid separation from their children; they were mercilessly beaten, driven out of the country, sometimes obliged to stand helplessly by whilst their unhappy children were tortured and ill-treated. Complaints were unavailing. "We obey the emperor's command," was the sole reply. Frederick William I., the noble-hearted king of Prussia, was the only German prince who exerted himself in their favour, and even threatened the archbishop with reprisals; but he was too distant; the inhuman separation of the children from their parents, a barbarity worthy of cannibals and of the savages of the wild, not of a civilized nation, so deeply revolted the Prussian monarch that he despatched commissioners to Salzburg in the hope of saving some of the children by this exertion of his authority, but in vain. Some of the boys, more courageous than the rest, afterwards succeeded in escaping from the hands of the Jesuits, and in begging their way to the new settlements on the Baltic.

The expelled peasantry were, ere long, followed by crowds of voluntary emigrants, more particularly from Berchtesgaden. They were mocked and ill-treated during their passage through the Catholic countries, but found a friendly reception in Würtemberg, Nuremberg, and Hesse. A part of them went to Holland and North America, but the greater number, amounting to sixteen thousand three hundred souls, went into Prussia and settled in the dwelling-places assigned to them by the king on the Niemen near to Tilsit, where their descendants still flourish.

The pope bestowed high encomium and the title of eccelsus on the archbishop. The establishment of a fresh Inquisition completely extinguished the liberty of conscience still feebly glimmering in the mountains. The more wealthy inhabitants were, notwithstanding the religious test, exposed to suspicion and to the consequent confiscation of their property. Missionaries travelled from house to house, listened to the guileless talk of the women and children, and then followed confiscation, scourging, imprisonment, or banishment. The Reck or rack-tower in the fortress of Werfen was destined exclusively for heretics, who were slung at an immense depth by long chains. According to the assertion of a traitor, named Vitus Loitscherger, no fewer than two hundred persons were, in 1743, delivered to the Inquisition.

A similar persecution, though not to such an extent, befell the secret Protestants in Austria at about the same period. The mountaineers in the Salzkammergut were [A. D. 1733] first treacherously examined under an assurance of liberty of conscience and then carried away by the soldiery and transported to Transylvania. The twelve hundred first sent away were, in 1736, followed by three hundred more. But when, in 1738, a great number of Protestants were discovered in the Traun district and in Kremsmünster, permission to emigrate was refused and some hundreds of them were shut up in a crooked position, exposed to the inclemency of the weather and miserably fed; many of them died. In 1740, Count von Seckau banished eight hundred men, but retained their wives and families, whom he compelled to embrace Catholicism.

In 1660, the rebellion of the peasantry belonging to the countship of Wied on the Rhine, and, in 1680, that of the Bohemian peasants against the heavy soccage-service occasioned its limitation by the emperor to a certain number of days. The people of Hauenstein in the Black Forest also refused to remain bound as serfs to the monastery of St. Blase, and, in 1728 and 1730, formed a secret confederation, under the name of saltpetres, for the recovery of their liberty, and, in fact, purchased their freedom from the abbot in 1738. In 1757, the Styrian peasantry rebelled against the heavy average-service.*. In 1665, the citizens of Lübeck, in 1708, those of Hamburg, in 1720, those of Brussels, opposed the usurpations of the city oligarchy, which secretly managed the government and practised usury. In 1716, the citizens of Spires again rebelled against their bishop, who threatened to take summary vengeance on one of their number, who is said to have spoken ill of him. His fellow-citizens took his part and prevented the bishop from executing his threat, until the

*On the 7th of August, 1704, the peasantry attacked the unpopular Count von Wurmbrand in his castle in Styria, dragged him forth and murdered him, each man dealing him a blow in order that all might, without exception, participate in the murder. In 1709, a noble clerk was beaten to death with flails by the peasantry. The nobles still possessed sufficient power to tyrannize. A Count von Droste-Vischering in the Bergland, being obstructed when hunting by a smithy, had it razed to the ground. The proprietor complained and received full compensation for his loss, but was not allowed to rebuild the smithy. See Montanus, Olden Times in Cleves and Berg.

peasantry, at his instigation, suddenly attacked the city, killed numbers of the citizens, and disarmed the rest. This martial bishop was named Henry Hartard von Rollingen.

War

Since the great revolt of the peasantry in Switzerland, that people had, from time to time, vainly sought to shake off the yoke of the city aristocracy. After a long fermentation, Toggenburg, so long enslaved by the Catholic cantons and by the abbot of St. Gall, was, [A. D. 1707,] on the intercession of Zurich and Berne, restored to the enjoyment of religious liberty. The entry of the Zurichers into Toggenburg and the acts of violence committed by the Reformers of Toggenburg in a Catholic church, however, again roused the ancient religious feud. The Catholic population, who had risen for the abbot, tore their leader, Felber, whom they suspected of treachery, to pieces. The anger of the Catholic cantons was roused. At Schwyz, the brave Stadler, who spoke in favour of the rights of the people of Toggenburg, was beheaded. broke out. At Bremgarten, the vanguard of the Catholics was beaten by the Bernese. The Catholics, doubly enraged at this repulse and animated by the nuntio and by the monks, rose en masse and overwhelmed the Bernese vanguard at Muri; three hundred of the Bernese were burnt to death in the church and on the tower of Merischwarden, where they had long defended themselves; the wounded were torn to pieces by dogs. A second decisive battle was fought [A. D. 1712] at Villmergen, where a contest had formerly taken place for a similar cause. The Reformed cantons were victorious. The Bernese generals, Tscharner and Diessbach, being dangerously wounded, Frisching, the mayor, a man seventy-four years of age, took the command and gained the day. The Catholics left between two and three thousand men dead on the field. Peace was made at Aarau, and the confederation remained unbroken notwithstanding the attempt made by Louis XIV., shortly before his death, to divide it into two independent parts according to their confession of faith, in order to rule with greater facility over both. A dispute that not long afterwards broke out between Lucerne, ever so zealously Catholic, and the pope contributed, no less than the defeat at Villmergen, to promote toleration towards the Reformers. On the occasion of the consecration of the church at Udligenswyl, in 1725, dancing was prohibited by the clergyman, Ander

natt, but being allowed by the temporal authorities, Andernatt appealed to his spiritual superiors and protested against the permission. He was suspended and banished by the council of Lucerne, but was protected by Passionei, the nuntio, who quitted Lucerne and removed his residence to Altorf. The dispute increased in virulence; the pope threatened, but the five Catholic cantons assembling and declaring in favour of the council of Lucerne, he was compelled to yield, and Andernatt remained in banishment, A. D. 1731. Shortly after this, the same council of Lucerne, by way of compensation to the pope, condemned an unlucky peasant, Jacob Schmidli of Sulzig, for reading the Bible and expounding it to others, to the stake and his house to be levelled with the ground, A. D. 1747.

The Swiss governments, at that period, relieved themselves from their discontented subjects by sending them into foreign service. The higher posts in the army were hereditary in the aristocratic families and were extremely lucrative. From 1742 to 1745 there were twenty-two thousand Swiss serving in France, twenty thousand in Holland, thirteen thousand six hundred in Spain, four thousand in Sardinia, two thousand four hundred in the imperial army, besides several regiments at Naples and the old Swiss guard at Rome.

In Berne, the power became gradually more firmly centred in a few of the great aristocratic burgher families. Besides the actual reigning council there was another pseudo one, in which the young patricians managed all the business, in order to learn the art of government; the rest of the citizens were excluded from all participation in public affairs. The material comfort of the citizens was well attended to by the aristocracy, and Berne consequently excelled almost all her sister cities in wealth and luxury; but the mind of the citizen was enslaved, and the insolence with which the patricians and their wives treated their fellow-citizens surpassed even the brutality of the coxcombs attached to the worst of the German courts. A conspiracy, set on foot by Henzi, the Bernese captain, was discovered, and he was executed together with two of his associates. The headsman several times missing his stroke and hacking him on the neck, he cried out, "Every thing, down to the headsman, is bad in this republic!" His charge against the aristocracy, in which he describes the manners of that time, is a masterly production. His death has been immortalized by Lessing.