measures of a similar nature impaired the credit of the most salutary innovations. The people looked with suspicion at every change, and, heedless of the lofty endeavors of the emperor, everybody, including the officials themselves, rejected the entire governmental system of Joseph. The emperor also wounded the national feeling of piety by his action concerning the crown he had spurned. According to ancient custom and law the sacred crown was kept in safety in Presburg, in a building provided for that purpose. In 1784 the emperor ordered the crown to be removed to Vienna, in order to be placed there in the royal treasury side by side with the crowns of his other lands. The nation revolted at this profanation of their hallowed relic, and the highest official authorities, throughout the land, protested against a measure which, while it created such widespread ill feeling, was not justified by any necessity. A dreadful storm, accompanied by thunder and lightning, was raging when the crown was removed to Vienna, and the people saw in this a sign that nature herself rebelled against the sacrilege committed by the emperor. The counties continued to urge the return of the crown in addresses which were sometimes humbly suppliant in their tone and sometimes threatening, but Joseph did not yield either to supplications or menaces. [Illustration: SLOVAK WOMAN AND CHILDREN.] When the edict, which made German the official language of the country, was published, the minds of men all over the country were already greatly disturbed. It is true, that hitherto the Latin and not the Hungarian language had been the medium of communication employed by the state. But the national spirit and the native tongue, which during the first seventy years of the eighteenth century had sadly degenerated, were awakening to new life during Joseph’s reign. The literature of the country began to be assiduously cultivated in different spheres. Royal body-guards belonging to distinguished families, gentlemen of refinement, clergymen of modest position, and other sons of the native soil labored with equal zeal and enthusiasm to foster their cherished mother-tongue. It would, therefore, have been an easy matter for Joseph to replace the Latin language, which had become an anachronism, by the Hungarian, and thus to restore the latter to its natural and legal position in the state. He was perfectly right in ridding the country of the mastery of a dead tongue, but he committed a most fatal error in trying to substitute for it the German, an error which avenged itself most bitterly. Joseph entertained a special antipathy to the Hungarian tongue, a dislike which betrayed him into omitting the teaching of the native language from the course of public instruction, and refusing to allow an academy of sciences to be established which had its cultivation for its object.