the Bohemian language and literature, and to Germanise the country. One Jesuit boasted that he had burned 60,000 volumes with his own hands. A Bohemian pastor showed me a volume of directions issued by the Jesuits for the guidance of the lower clergy in the destruction of Bohemian books. These instructions proceed on the assumption that many of those to whom it fell to carry them into effect, would be unable to read. They were therefore to be taught to identify heretical books by the bindings, title pages and illustrations. Throughout this period the cost of burning Bibles appears as an annual charge in the Bohemian Budget!
From 1620 until 1781 Protestantism was entirely suppressed. “But,” as Mr. Dusék writes, “it had so tenacious a hold of the mind of the nation, that it required most excruciating measures and repeated stabs ere its influence fainted and the nation fell into a deathlike swoon. In 1650 Protestantism was stamped a crime like murder and high treason; then the doors of jails opened again, and new emigrations followed each other. As late as 1735 thousands of Protestants from Bohemia perished in the mines of Transylvania, and countless Protestant youths, sentenced to perpetual military service, fell struck by the bullets of the Jannisaries on the banks of the Danube.” During this period of 160 years, the Bohemian nation, crippled and enchained, make no appearance in European affairs, although many of the battles of the Thirty Years’ and Seven Years’ Wars were fought upon Bohemia’s fertile plains.
In 1781, the Emperor Joseph II., son of Maria Theresa, who had previously expelled the Jesuits from the Austrian dominions, issued his famous edict of toleration, under which a certain measure of liberty was again accorded to Protestantism; and this was the dawning of a better day. He, however, continued the attempt of his predecessors to Germanise the Bohemians, a policy which Austria has ever since pursued, blind to the fact that, if she succeeded, the inevitable result would be that Bohemia would fall to Germany, as Saxony did in the war of 1866. This effort to cast all Austria in a German mould was Joseph’s fatal mistake, and stifled his well-meaning but crudely attempted reforms.
