The criminal history of the Genevan Republic reflects the temper of the time, and the spirit of the ecclesiastical leaders. Vice was mercilessly punished, and drunkenness, blasphemy, and unbelief were put in the same category with murder. One reads with dismay of the state of terrorism prevailing during the plague raging about the middle of the century. Superstition was rife and increasing, and every kind of torture was used to extort confessions from accused persons. Whilst the plague was at its worst the sword, the gallows, the stake were equally busy. The jailor asserted that his prisons were filled to excess, and the executioner complained that his arms were tired. Within a period of three years there were passed fifty-eight sentences of death, seventy-six of banishment, and eight to nine thousand of imprisonment, on those whose crime was infringement of the Church statutes. Offences against himself personally Calvin treated as blasphemy, as he identified himself with the prophets of old. Strange as this assertion is, it can be supported. A single instance will suffice. One Pierre Amieaux, a councillor, had once in company spoken of Calvin as a bad man. This the reformer declared to be blasphemy, and refused to preach again till satisfaction was done to him.[56] In such manner was Geneva forced into obedience. However, there was one powerful check on Calvin's progress, viz., the efforts of the national party, the "Children of Geneva," as they called themselves, or the "Libertines," as their opponents nicknamed them.[57] An excellent way of neutralizing the influence of these, Calvin tells his friend Bullinger, at Zurich, was to expel the natives and admit French _emigrés_ to the Genevan citizenship. "The dogs are barking at me on all sides," he complains to the same friend, and now and then he made a clean sweep of his adversaries. The Genevans naturally looked with disfavour on Calvin's policy, objecting to the French refugees not so much from ill will as from a natural dislike to leaving a city to which they were so devotedly attached, and seeing the positions of honour and influence taken up by the strangers. At last, exasperated beyond measure by the admission of a fresh batch of refugees, the Libertines attempted a _coup de main_ on the Calvin government, May, 1555. The attempt miscarried, and the ringleaders were put to death or imprisoned, and most of the rank and file expelled from the city. To fill the great gaps thus caused, three hundred and fifty-nine French families were admitted gradually to the citizenship, and in this way within a few years the population increased from thirteen thousand to twenty thousand. Such high-handed proceedings--wholesale proscriptions one might call them--caused the wheels to run smoothly enough, and Calvin was now completely master of the situation. The imprisonment and burning of Servetus for denying the doctrine of the Trinity once more ruffled the