-guards belonging to distinguished families, gentlemen of
refinement, clergymen of modest position, and other sons of the native
soil labored with equal zeal and enthusiasm to foster their cherished
mother-tongue.

It would, therefore, have been an easy matter for Joseph to replace the
Latin language, which had become an anachronism, by the Hungarian, and
thus to restore the latter to its natural and legal position in the
state. He was perfectly right in ridding the country of the mastery of
a dead tongue, but he committed a most fatal error in trying to
substitute for it the German, an error which avenged itself most
bitterly. Joseph entertained a special antipathy to the Hungarian
tongue, a dislike which betrayed him into omitting the teaching of the
native language from the course of public instruction, and refusing to
allow an academy of sciences to be established which had its cultivation
for its object.

The Emperor's attack upon the language of the nation irremediably broke
the last tie between him and the country, and henceforth the relations
between them could be only hostile. The counties assumed a threatening
attitude, some of them refusing obedience altogether. Thus most of them
declined to give their official cooperation to the army officers who had
been delegated by the Emperor to take the census. The count,
nevertheless, proceeded, but in many places the inhabitants escaped to
the woods, and in some there were serious riots in consequence of the
opposition to the commissioners of the census.

A rising of a different character took place among the Wallachs. The
Wallachs, smarting under abuses of long standing, buoyed up by
exaggerated expectations consequent upon the Emperor's innovations, and
stirred up by evil-minded agitators, took to arms and perpetrated the
most outrageous atrocities against their Hungarian landlords. The
ignorant common people were assured by their leaders, Hora and Kloska,
that the Emperor himself sided with them. The Wallach insurgents
assassinated the Government's commissioners sent to them, destroyed
sixty villages and one hundred eighty-two gentlemen's mansions, and
killed four thousand Hungarians before they could be checked in their
bloody work. Although they were finally crushed and punished, a strong
belief prevailed in the country that the court of Vienna had been privy
to the Wallach rising.

Joseph subsequently laid down most humane rules regulating the relations
bet