After the Peace of Westphalia, October 24th, Salzburg was made an independent and sovereign principality, and the archbishops, the Chapter, and various other authorities, set to work to bring about improvements in the Civil and Ecclesiastical offices and organizations of the country, and to improve the condition of the inhabitants by better regulations of taxes, the criminal law, etc., and to complete the building of the city and improvement of the existing portions of it by the repaving of the streets and instituting better sanitary arrangements. But notwithstanding the undoubted benefits conferred in the way we have mentioned upon the inhabitants, the clerical party maintained a rigorous persecution of the Protestants, and in consequence the years 1684-85 witnessed large emigrations of Lutherans, including great numbers of the Hallein miners. These persecutions were followed half a century later by those of the Archbishop Leopold Anton Freiherr von Fermian, who summoned the Jesuits into the country to aid in extirpating the Protestants. These priests succeeded in stirring up further dissensions between the Catholics and the Lutherans, and cruel persecutions, accompanied by torture and imprisonment, followed. The Archbishop, finding the Jesuits had not succeeded in reducing the country to uniformity of religion or a more peaceful state, issued on the last day of October, 1731, the famous emigration edict by which the Protestants were to be deprived of all their property and their rights as citizens, and to be driven from the principality. The result was the forming of the celebrated Salzbund, by which the followers of the reformed faith banded themselves together and swore to defend it, and as a token they licked a block of salt placed for the purpose on a table, which is still preserved at Schwarzach, where the League was formed. In the end, in consequence of Archbishop Fermian's edict, upwards of 30,000 people emigrated, and as was the case with the Huguenots of France they formed by far the most able, industrious, and intelligent portion of the community, and the consequences of their emigration are even felt at the present time. By the expulsion of the Protestants, many of whom were miners, we are told "the mining industry of Salzburg received its death blow, the prosperity of the country was greatly diminished, and the free national and civic life was destroyed." The greater number of these emigrants eventually settled in Prussian Lithuania, where they were warmly and hospitably received. Others went to Bavaria, and Suabia, and a few even to England, some of the latter of whom ultimately crossed the Atlantic and settled in Georgia, where in the town of Ebenezer there still exists a colony of their descendants.