The German, Swiss, and Scandinavian rulers made, modified, and changed the religion of their subjects at will. Of the intolerance of the Calvanistic Republic of Geneva less said the better. Oppenheim, often pawned by its needy electors, is said to have changed its form of Protestantism fifteen times in twenty-one years. In Denmark, where Lutheranism was paramount and unadulterated, we find, writes Dollinger, “that the nobility made use of the Reformation to appropriate not only the Church lands, but that owned by the peasants.” “A dog-like servitude weighs down the Danish peasants, and the citizens, deprived of all representative power, groan under oppressive burdens” (_Geshicte von Rugen_, p. 294, quoted by Dollinger). “The dwellers on the great estates of the Church were now obliged to exchange the mild rule of the clergy for the oppressive rule of the nobility,” writes Allen, page 313. “By these laws and enforced compacts the spoliation and the degradation of once free peasants were accomplished.” In 1702 Frederick IX abolished slavery, but glebe serfdom, as in Russia, continued till 1804. Until 1766 the education of the people stood at the lowest grade, and it was not till 1804 that freedom was conferred on 20,000 families who had been in a state of serfdom since the Reformation. In Sweden we find the great Protestant hero, Gustavus Vasa, appropriating all the commonage lands of the villages, and even the weirs, the mines, and all uncultivated lands. Gustavus was, of course, obliged to share the spoils with his henchmen, whose rule was even more oppressive, and the peasants became wholly impoverished and degraded. In Germany we find the same record of spoliation and oppression of the peasantry, whose rights there was none to defend since bishops no longer sat in the Diet. In 1663, 1646, 1654, the personal liberty of the peasants was progressively annihilated. “Then was forged that slave chain,” writes Boll, “which our peasantry have had to drag within a few decades of the present day” (_Mecklenburg Geschichte_). In 1820 this glebe serfdom was abolished by the Grand Duke. In Pomerania, united with Brandenburg since the Reformation, Protestantism was paramount already in 1534, and the fate of the peasantry was the same. The oppression was so intolerable that even those whose farms had not been appropriated or turned into grazing grounds, as in Ireland, fled the country. In the peasant ordinance of 1616 they were declared “serfs without any civil rights,” and preachers were compelled to denounce fugitives from the pulpit. The Elector of Brandenburg, it will be recalled, was the first to abjure Catholicism, and founded what became in 1701 the Prussian monarchy. There was no general Diet since 1656. The Estates no longer met, and the rulers imposed taxes at their will. Peasants fled to Poland, or became mendicant vagrants or brigands.