Such were the calamities that marked the course of these devastating
hosts. And yet the evils inflicted by Jacobin France were less intense
and less permanent than those exercised by her legislation. In politics
the expulsion of the ecclesiastical electors, who, though they had
sometimes given in to the false spirit of the age, had ever been the
mildest and most benevolent of rulers; the proscription of a nobility
that had ever lived in the kindliest relations with its tenantry; and on
the ruins of old aristocratic and municipal institutions that had long
guarded and sustained popular freedom, a coarse, leveling tyranny,
sometimes democratic, sometimes imperial, established; in the church the
oppression of the priesthood, a heartless religious indifferentism,
undignified even by attempts at philosophic speculation, propagated and
encouraged; and through the poisoned channels of education the taint of
infidelity transmitted to generations yet unborn. Such were the evils
that followed the establishment of the French domination in the
conquered provinces of Germany.
Pages:
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373