The University of Cracow, writing to that of Louvain, and referring to one of those expeditions against the Protestants, headed by Jesuits, in 1621, expresses itself as follows: “The Jesuits are very cunning, expert in a thousand artifices, and clever at feigning simplicity; but they were the cause of much innocent blood being shed. The town (Cracow) was deluged with it. The fathers were never satiated with murders, only the arms of those ruffians whom they employed for their crimes were tired; they were moved with compassion, and refused at last to proceed in the massacre.”[275] Indeed, the fiery spirit of intolerance and bigotry which the Jesuits had diffused was so strong and universal, that even Wladislau, Sigismund’s successor, notwithstanding all his efforts, could not arrest the religious persecution and protect his Protestant subjects from the sanguinary fury of the Papists. It is true that Sigismund, in following the Jesuits’ directions, and in attempting to re-introduce Romanism into all his dominions, had lost his hereditary kingdom of Sweden and the magnificent province of Livonia; but that was nothing to the fathers. Protestantism was broken, their opponents were despised or sacrificed, their houses and colleges had received great additional revenues—what did they care for the losses of others? On the premature death of Wladislau, his brother Cassimir ascended the throne of Poland. He had been a Jesuit, and had sat in the College of Cardinals. The Pope, that he might assume the sceptre, had granted him a dispensation from all his vows. This Jesuit king, by his bad conduct and cowardice, very nigh lost his kingdom; and when his subjects recovered it from the hand of the imperious Charles Gustavus, king of Sweden, he, in gratitude for that fidelity and gallantry, “committed himself and the kingdom to the care of the Virgin Mary, and vowed to convert the heretics;” which meant, says Krasinski, to disperse and extirpate them. The Jesuits triumphed. We shall not follow those pitiless and relentless monks in all the iniquities they committed, in all the miseries they inflicted on poor Poland, which owes in great part to them the loss of her literature, of her glory, and, in part, of her national existence.