The death of Ferdinand II. in 1637 made no difference in the position of the Jesuits. Ferdinand III. had been carefully trained by them, and he was ever ready to endanger the welfare of his Empire and disturb the peace of his subjects by furthering the designs of the Jesuits in the Protestant Provinces, as we shall see presently. Leopold I., who succeeded in 1657, was an even more fervent pupil of the Jesuits, and had been destined for the priesthood. We may say, in a word, that the Jesuits retained their wealth and power until, to their great anger and disappointment, the Emperor Joseph II. light-heartedly joined the other Catholic monarchs in the campaign for the suppression of the Society, and even Maria Theresa refused to plead for them with the Papacy. At that time their property alone was worth more than £2,000,000, but the Government discovered that they had anticipated the dissolution by investing large sums abroad. It is therefore impossible to estimate their real wealth, but when we add to the income from their vast estates the salaries of royal and noble confessors, the fees of masses and spiritual exercises, the emoluments of university and other teachers, and the very generous and constant inflow of gifts and legacies, we realise that the Austrian Jesuits cannot have been much less wealthy than those of France and Spain. It may be suggested that we should regard this wealth with indulgence, in spite of the Jesuit vow of poverty, because of the immense educational services which the Society rendered to the Empire. Their school-system has, however, been heavily criticised by Austrian writers, and even in the height of their power it was boldly and successfully assailed by Austrian statesmen. A memorial addressed to the Empress Maria Theresa in 1757 insisted that all the universities had deteriorated since they had been captured by the Jesuits. Two years later (September 1759) the Empress compelled them to surrender to other teachers the chairs of logic, ethics, metaphysics, and history, and several chairs of theology, which they held at the Vienna University. The historian of the university, Kink, fully confirms this statement that it deteriorated under the control of the Jesuits. Indeed, the learned Oratorian priest Father Theiner, the Prefect of the Vatican Archives, shows in his _Histoire du Pontificat de Clément XIV._ that in other ways the Jesuits had done grave harm to culture in Catholic Germany. Their selfish determination to monopolise teaching and letters had destroyed the intellectual life of the non-Jesuit clergy, and there were few to succeed them when the Society was abolished. We shall see later that when Frederick the Great annexed Silesia, where the German Jesuits controlled education, he disdainfully advised them to send to France for some abler teachers.