shelter, perished miserably by thousands.  The devastation of the Palatinate is one of the most cruel deeds which war has ever perpetrated.  For these woes, which no imagination can gauge, Louis XIV. is responsible.  He has escaped any adequate earthly penalty for the crime, but the instinctive sense of justice implanted in every breast, demands that he should not escape the retributions of a righteous God.  “After death cometh the judgment.”

This horrible deed roused Germany.  All Europe now combined against France, except Portugal, Russia and a few of the Italian States.  The tide now turned in favor of the house of Austria.  Germany was so alarmed by the arrogance of France, that, to strengthen the power of the emperor, the diet with almost perfect unanimity elected his son Joseph, though a lad but eleven years of age, to succeed to the imperial throne.  Indeed, Leopold presented his son in a manner which seemed to claim the crown for him as his hereditary right, and the diet did not resist that claim.  France, rich and powerful, with marvelous energy breasted her host of foes.  All Europe was in a blaze.  The war raged on the ocean, over the marshes of Holland, along the banks of the Rhine, upon the plains of Italy, through the defiles of the Alps and far away on the steppes of Hungary and the shores of the Euxine.  To all these points the emperor was compelled to send his troops.  Year after year of carnage and woe rolled on, during which hardly a happy family could be found in all Europe.

  “Man’s inhumanity to man
  Made countless millions mourn.”

At last all parties became weary of the war, and none of the powers having gained any thing of any importance by these long years of crime and misery, for which Louis XIV., as the aggressor, is mainly responsible, peace was signed on the 30th of October, 1697.  One important thing, indeed, had been accomplished.  The rapacious Louis XIV. had been checked in his career of spoliation.  But his insatiate ambition was by no means subdued.  He desired peace only that he might more successfully prosecute his plans of aggrandizement.  He soon, by his system of robbery, involved Europe again in war.  Perhaps no man has ever lived who has caused more bloody deaths and more wide-spread destruction of human happiness than Louis XIV.  We wonder not that in the French Revolution an exasperated people should have rifled his sepulcher and spurned his skull over the pavements as a foot-ball.

Leopold, during the progress of these wars, by the aid of the armies which the empire furnished him, recovered all of Hungary and Transylvania, driving the Turks beyond the Danube.  But the proud Hungarian nobles were about as much opposed to the rule of the Austrian king as to that of the Turkish sultan.  The Protestants gained but little by the change, for the Mohammedan was about as tolerant as the papist.  They all suspected Leopold of the design of establishing over them despotic power, and they formed a secret confederacy for their own protection.  Leopold, released from his warfare against France and the Turks, was now anxious to consolidate his power in Hungary, and justly regarding the Roman Catholic religion as the great bulwark against liberty, encouraged the Catholics to persecute the Protestants.