Liberty, equality, and justice were, at that period, in all other respects, mere fictions. The most arbitrary rule in reality existed, and the new provinces were systematically drained by taxes of every description, as, for instance, register, stamp, patent, window, door, and land taxes: there was also a tax upon furniture and upon luxuries of every sort; a poll-tax, a percentage on the whole assessment, etc.; besides extortion, confiscation, and forced sales. And woe to the new citizen of the great French republic if he failed in paying more servile homage to its officers, from the prefect down to the lowest underling, than had ever been exacted by the princes![12] Such was the liberty bestowed by republican France! Thus were her promises fulfilled! The German Illuminati were fearfully undeceived, particularly on perceiving how completely their hopes of universally revolutionizing Germany were frustrated by the treaty of Basel. The French, who had proclaimed liberty to all the nations of the earth, now offered it for sale. The French character was in every respect the same as during the reign of Louis XIV. The only principle to which they remained ever faithful was that of robbery.--Switzerland was now, in her turn, attacked, and vengeance thus overtook every province that had severed itself from the empire, and every part of the once magnificent empire of Germany was miserably punished for its want of unity. [Footnote 1: Clausewitz demands, with great justice, why the Austrians so greatly divided their forces on this occasion for the sake of saving Italy, as they had only to follow up their successes vigorously on the Rhine in order to gain, in that quarter, far more than they could lose on the Po.] [Footnote 2: At Absom, in the valley of the Inn, a peasant girl had, at that time, discovered a figure of the Virgin in one of the panes of glass in her chamber window. This appearance being deemed miraculous by the simple peasantry, the authorities of the place investigated the matter, had the glass cleaned and scraped, etc., and at length pronounced the indelible figure to be simply the outline of an old colored painting. The peasantry, however, excited by the appearance of the infidel French, persisted in giving credence to the miracle and set up the piece of glass in a church, which was afterward annually visited by thousands of pilgrims. In 1407, the celebrated pilgrimage to Waldrast, in the Tyrol, had been founded in a similar manner by the discovery of a portrait of the Virgin which had been grown up in a tree, by two shepherd lads.]