s of the poor, especially in the country. In
the villages, undoubtedly, there were schools, but the master was
frequently only a former servant of the landed proprietor, a poor
tailor or weaver, who gave up his work as little as possible, and
perhaps left his wife to conduct the school. The police of the low
countries was still ineffective, and the vagrants were a heavy burden.
There were certainly strict regulations against roving vagabonds:
village watchmen and mounted patrols were to stop every beggar, and
pass him on to his birth-place; but the village watchman did not watch,
the communities shunned the expenses of transport or feared the revenge
of the offenders, and the patrols preferred looking after the carriers,
who went out of the turnpike roads, because these could pay a fine.
Complaints were made of this even in Electoral Saxony.

The countryman still continued true to his church; there was much
praying and psalm-singing in the huts of the poor, frequently a good
deal of pious enthusiasm; there were still revivalists and prophets
among the country people. In the mountain countries, especially where
an active industry had established itself, in the poorest huts, among
the wood carvers, weavers, and lacemakers of the Erzgebirger and of the
Silesian valleys, a pious, godly feeling was alive. A few years later,
when the continental embargo annihilated the industry of the poor, amid
hunger and deprivations which often brought them to the point of death,
they showed that their faith gave them the power of suffering with
resignation.

Betwixt the nobility and the mass of the people stood the higher class
of citizens: literati, officials, ecclesiastics, great merchants, and
tradespeople. They also were divided from the people by a privilege,
the importance of which would not be understood in our time,--they were
exempt from military service. The severest oppression which fell on the
sons of the people, their children were free from. The sons of peasants
or artisans who had the capacity for study could do so, but they had
first to pass an examination, the so-called "genius test," to exempt
them from service in the army. But to the son of a literary man or a
merchant it was a disgrace, if, after a learned school education, he
sank so low as to fall into the hands of recruiting officers. Even the
benevolent Kant refused the request of a scholar for a recommendation,
because he had had the meanness to bear his position