The Catholic electors felt themselves within reach of the settlement which they had long proclaimed as the object of their desires. They then proceeded to kick away the ladder by which they had climbed so high. It is not derogating from the merits of Tilly and his veterans to say that without Wallenstein they would have been unable to cope with the forces opposed to them. Wallenstein's army had driven Mansfeld back, had hemmed in Bethlen Gabor, had recovered Silesia, had contributed to the victory of Lutter. And yet that army threatened to establish itself upon the ruins of the authority of the princes and electors, and to set up a military despotism of the most intolerable kind. Everywhere Wallenstein's recruiting officers were beating their drums. Quiet episcopal cities in the south of Germany, which hoped to have seen the last of their troubles when Mansfeld vanished westward out of Alsace in 1622, found themselves suddenly selected as a trysting-place for some new regiment. Rough men poured in from every direction to be armed, clothed, lodged, and fed at their expense. The alarming doctrine that the army was to support itself, that men were to be raised for the purpose not of fighting the enemy, but of pressing contributions out of friends caused universal consternation. Wallenstein's officers, too, had been heard to talk with military frankness about pulling down princes and electors, and making a real sovereign of the Emperor. [Sidenote: § 3. Yet they cannot do without him.] The voice of complaint swelled loudly. But those who raised it did not see that their own policy was at fault; that but for their refusal to yield on the question of the bishoprics, there would have been no need for Wallenstein's army at all. What they were doing required the aid of overpowering military force, and they were startled when he who wielded the sword insisted on being their master. For the present, therefore, the electors did not venture on anything more than a gentle remonstrance with Wallenstein, and a petition to the Emperor to remove the abuses which, as they well knew, were radically connected with the new system. [Sidenote: 1628. § 4. The commercial towns of the north.]