hundred and eighty men at arms that had been sent against him
returned defeated, nothing else remained for the city councilors, who
did not wish to jeopardize the wealth of the place, but to bar the
gates completely and set the citizens to keep watch day and night
outside the walls. In vain the city council had declarations posted in
the villages of the surrounding country, with the positive assurance
that the Squire was not in the Pleissenburg. The horse-dealer, in
similar manifestos, insisted that he was in the Pleissenburg and
declared that if the Squire were not there, he, Kohlhaas, would at any
rate proceed as though he were until he should have been told the
name of the place where his enemy was to be found. The Elector,
notified by courier of the straits to which the city of Leipzig was
reduced, declared that he was already gathering a force of two
thousand men and would put himself at their head in order to capture
Kohlhaas. He administered to Sir Otto von Gorgas a severe rebuke for
the misleading and ill-considered artifice to which he had resorted to
rid the vicinity of Wittenberg of the incendiary. Nor can any one
describe the confusion which seized all Saxony, and especially the
electoral capital, when it was learned there that in all the villages
near Leipzig a declaration addressed to Kohlhaas had been placarded,
no one knew by whom, to the effect that "Wenzel, the Squire, was with
his cousins Hinz and Kunz in Dresden."

It was under these circumstances that Doctor Martin Luther, supported
by the authority which his position in the world gave him, undertook
the task of forcing Kohlhaas, by the power of kindly words, back
within the limits set by the social order of the day. Building upon an
element of good in the breast of the incendiary, he had posted in all
the cities and market-towns of the Electorate a placard addressed to
him, which read as follows:

"Kohlhaas, thou who claimest to be sent to wield the sword of justice,
what is it that thou, presumptuous man, art making bold to attempt in
the madness of thy stone-blind passion--thou who art filled from head
to foot with injustice? Because the sovereign, to whom thou art
subject, has denied thee thy rights--thy rights in the struggle for a
paltry trifle--thou arisest, godless man, with fire and sword, and
like a wolf of the wilderness dost burst upon the peaceful community
which he protects. Thou, who misleadest men with this declaration full
of unt