tern limit. No stage in the history of a people is more gloomy and
calls more loudly for sympathy than when national prestige is gone, and
dignities usurped by foreign conquerors. Though the apathy of despair is
a theme more becoming the poet than the historian, we find a vivid
description of the sadness and desolation produced by the French
domination given by one who deeply felt the disgrace of his country.
This writer says:

"The Divine Nemesis now stretched forth her hand against devoted
Germany, and chastened her rulers and her people for the sins and
transgressions of many generations. Like those wild sons of the desert,
whom in the seventh century, heaven let loose to punish the degenerate
Christians of the East, the new Islamite hordes of revolutionary France
were permitted by Divine Providence to spread through Germany, as
through almost every country in Europe, terror and desolation.

"What shall I say of the endless evils that accompanied and followed the
march of her armies, the desolation of provinces, the plunder of cities,
the spoliation of church property, the desecration of altars, the
proscription of the virtuous, the exaltation of the unworthy members of
society, the horrid mummeries of irreligion practised in many of the
conquered cities, the degradation of life and the profanation of death.
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. Doubtless, through the all-wise
dispensations of