Bohemia he succeeded in maintaining the right given by Joseph to the peasant to commute his personal service for a money payment, in Hungary he was compelled to fall back upon the system of Theresa, and to leave the final settlement of the question to the Diet. Twenty years later the statesman who emancipated the peasants of Prussia observed that Hungary was the only part of the Austrian dominions in which the peasant was not in a better condition than his fellows in North Germany; [9] and so torpid was the humanity of the Diet that until the year 1835 the prison and the flogging-board continued to form a part of every Hungarian manor. [Death of Leopold, March 1, 1792.] [Francis II., 1792.] Of the self-sacrificing ardour of Joseph there was no trace in Leopold's character; yet his political aims were not low. During twenty-four years' government of Tuscany he had proved himself almost an ideal ruler in the pursuit of peace, of religious enlightenment, and of the material improvement of his little sovereignty. Raised to the Austrian throne, the compromise which he effected with the Church and the aristocracy resulted more from a supposed political necessity than from his own inclination. So long as Leopold lived, Austria would not have wanted an intelligence capable of surveying the entire field of public business, nor a will capable of imposing unity of action upon the servants of State. To the misfortune of Europe no less than of his own dominions, Leopold was carried off by sickness at the moment when the Revolutionary War broke out. An uneasy reaction against Joseph's reforms and a well-grounded dread of the national movements in Hungary and the Netherlands were already the principal forces in the official world at Vienna; in addition to these came the new terror of the armed proselytism of the Revolution. The successor of Leopold, Francis II., was a sickly prince, in whose homely and unimaginative mind the great enterprises of Joseph, amidst which he had been brought up, excited only aversion. Amongst the men who surrounded him, routine and the dread of change made an end of the higher forms of public life. The Government openly declared that all change should cease so long as the war lasted; even the pressing question of the peasant's relation to his lord was allowed to remain unsettled by the Hungarian Diet, lest the spirit of national independence should find expression in its debates. Over the whole internal administration of Austria the torpor of the days before Theresa seemed to be returning. Its foreign policy, however, bore no trace of this timorous, conservative spirit. Joseph, as restless abroad as at home, had shared the ambition of the Russian Empress Catherine, and troubled Europe with his designs upon Turkey, Venice, and Bavaria. These and similar schemes of territorial extension continued to fill the minds of Austrian courtiers and ambassadors. Shortly after the outbreak of war with