In the Austrian dominions, the Church succeeded, in 1525, in inducing the Emperor Ferdinand to prohibit the sale or the possession of Lutheran or Calvinist literature. The book-pedlars succeeded for a time in evading the prohibition and in distributing large supplies of the Testament and of the tracts. The persistency of the Jesuits was, however, in the end successful in crushing out the business. Book-pedlars were treated as malefactors, the peasantry and the townsfolk were frightened, and the demand gradually died away. In other portions of Germany, the circulation of the Protestant literature was, on the whole, increased through the prohibitions. The usual price for the Protestant tracts was one groschen, equal to two and a half cents, or in purchasing power to perhaps twelve cents to-day. Each tract reached, as a rule, a number of readers or of hearers, for the old Oriental and Greek practice of reading aloud to an audience was carried on in hundreds of market-places, shops, and other informal auditoriums. One of the travelling printers and book-pedlars who came to a tragical end was Johann Herrgott, who has before been referred to as a reprinter in Nuremberg of Luther’s writings, and who appears to have circulated also a number of tracts considered by Luther to be extremely heretical. He was executed, in 1527, in Leipzig, under the instructions of Duke George of Saxony. The Duke was an old-time opponent of Luther, and he appears to have taken the ground that freedom of speech in any direction was objectionable. There was paid for the burial of this too-persistent bookseller the sum of six groschens. The circulation of the Lutheran tracts was taken charge of not only by the book-pedlars and colporteurs but by a large number of travelling preachers, _Prädikanten_. These “preachers” were, in part, old-time priests, but in many cases laymen of very varying degrees of education or of ignorance. The Wittenberg tracts gave, however, a supply of ammunition which even the most ignorant preachers could make effective. In reaching the masses of the people, such tracts could be made more serviceable than the rejoinders of the Catholic writers, as these last were, with hardly an exception, written in Latin.