This outbreak of the reactionary spirit caused great inconvenience to a large number of perfectly sincere people who were honestly trying to go to the root of our many social ills. Time, however, the great laundress, has long since removed whatever spots the local police magistrates were able to detect upon the professorial garments of these amiable scholars. Today, King Frederick William of Prussia is chiefly remembered because he interfered with the teachings of Emanuel Kant, that dangerous radical who taught that the maxims of our own actions must be worthy of being turned into universal laws and whose doctrines, according to the police reports, appealed only to “beardless youths and idle babblers.” The Duke of Cumberland has gained lasting notoriety because as King of Hanover he exiled a certain Jacob Grimm who had signed a protest against “His Majesty’s unlawful abrogation of the country’s constitution.” And Metternich has retained a certain notoriety because he extended his watchful suspicion to the field of music and once censored the music of Schubert. Poor old Austria! Now that it is dead and gone, all the world feels kindly disposed towards the “gay empire” and forgets that once upon a time it had an active intellectual life of its own and was something more than an amusing and well-mannered county-fair with excellent and cheap wine, atrocious cigars and the most enticing of waltzes, composed and conducted by no one less than Johann Strauss himself. We may go even further and state that during the entire eighteenth century Austria played a very important rôle in the development of the idea of religious tolerance. Immediately after the Reformation the Protestants had found a fertile field for their operations in the rich province between the Danube and the Carpathian Mountains. But this had changed when Rudolf II became emperor. This Rudolf was a German version of Spanish Philip, a ruler to whom treaties made with heretics were of no consequence whatsoever. But although educated by the Jesuits, he was incurably lazy and this saved his empire from too drastic a change of policy. That came when Ferdinand II was chosen emperor. This monarch’s chief qualification for office was the fact that he alone among all the Habsburgs was possessed of a few sons. Early during his reign he had visited the famous House of the Annunciation, bodily moved in the year 1291 by a number of angels from Nazareth to Dalmatia and hence to central Italy, and there in an outburst of religious fervor he had sworn a dire oath to make his country one-hundred-percent Catholic. He had been as good as his word. In the year 1629 Catholicism once more was proclaimed the official and exclusive faith of Austria and Styria and Bohemia and Silesia.