passed in the Prussian parliament, forbidding the exercise of ecclesiastical offices by unauthorized persons, and it contained a provision that any one who had been convicted under the law could be deprived of his rights of citizenship, ordered to live in a particular district, or even expelled from the kingdom. The result was that in numerous parishes the police were occupied in searching for the priest who was living there among the people; although his habitation was known to hundreds of people, the police seldom succeeded in arresting him. Bismarck confesses that his doubts as to the wisdom of this legislation were raised by the picture of heavy but honest _gens d'armes_ pursuing light-footed priests from house to house. This law was followed by one authorizing the government to suspend, in every diocese where the bishop continued recalcitrant, the payment of that contribution to the Roman Catholic Church which by agreement had been given by the state since 1817. The only result of this was that large sums were collected by voluntary contribution among the Roman Catholic population. The government tried to find priests to occupy the vacant parishes; few consented to do so, and the _Staatskatholiken_ who consented to the new laws were avoided by their parishioners. Men refused to attend their ministrations; in some cases they were subjected to what was afterwards called boycotting, and it was said that their lives were scarcely safe. Other laws excluded all religious orders from Prussia, and civil marriage was made compulsory; this law, which at first was confined to Prussia, was afterwards passed also in the Reichstag. These laws were all peculiar to Prussia, but similar legislation was carried out in Baden and in Hesse, where in 1871, after twenty-one years of office, the particularist and Conservative government of Dalwigk[6] had come to an end and after the interval of a year been succeeded by a Liberal ministry. In Württemberg alone the government continued to live peaceably with the bishops. The government had used all its resources; it had alienated millions of the people; it had raised up a compact party of nearly a hundred members in parliament. The attempt of the Liberals to subjugate the Church had given to the Papacy greater power than it had had since the time of Wallenstein. Reaction against Liberalism.