the landowner. Yet the evil seed of hatred and distrust sown by the oppressors of the seventeenth and eighteenth century bears evil fruit up to the present day. Bohemian peasants even now instinctively distrust the nobles of their country, even if they belong to their own race, and are in full sympathy with the national cause. This antagonism has frequently contributed to the failure of the attempts of the Bohemians to recover their autonomy.
The wars and negotiations of the court of Vienna at the end of the seventeenth and during the eighteenth century cannot be considered as forming part of Bohemian history. Some large Bohemian landowners played a considerable part in the government of the empire, but their only connection with Bohemia consisted in the fact that they drew very large revenues from their estates situated in that country. Every trace of municipal self-government gradually disappeared both in the cities of Prague and in the other towns of the kingdom. The scanty contemporary references to the internal condition of Bohemia record only successfully repressed revolts of the peasantry, and occasional religious persecutions when it was believed that Protestants had secretly entered Bohemia. The extreme zeal of the Jesuits, who sometimes extended their persecutions to Silesia—where the Protestants possessed a limited amount of independence—occasionally directed the attention of Europe to the almost forgotten lands of the Bohemian crown. When King Charles XII of Sweden had defeated King Augustus of Poland and pursued his enemy to his hereditary Saxon electorate, he took up his quarters for a considerable time at Alt-Ranstädt near Leipzig. It was here brought to his notice that the Romanist priests had closed the churches in Silesia which the treaty of Westphalia had guaranteed to the Protestants. Charles, who was by inheritance a guarantor of the treaty of Westphalia, was very indignant at this breach of faith, and, impetuous as he always was, he immediately meditated on a march on Vienna. The envoys of the Austrian government who visited him, however, succeeded in pacifying him, and a treaty between Austria and Sweden was signed at Alt-Ranstädt, which assured to the Protestants of Silesia the preservation of their former privileges.
About the middle of the eighteenth century a great constitutional change affecting all the lands subject to the
