red
through the whole territory, which had been energetically colonised by
the rich Cistercian monasteries of Oliva and Pelplin. But the
tyrannical severity of this order drove the German cities and landed
proprietors of West Prussia, in the fifteenth century, to annex
themselves to Poland. The Reformation of the sixteenth century subdued
not only the souls of the German colonists, but also those of the
Poles. In the great Polish Republic, three-fourths of the nobility
became Protestants, and in the Sclavonian districts of Pommerellen,
seventy out of one hundred parishes, did the same. But the introduction
of the Jesuits brought an unhealthy change. The Polish nobles fell back
to the Roman Catholic Church, their sons were brought up in the
Jesuits' schools as converting fanatics. From that time the Polish
State began to decline; its condition became constantly more hopeless.

There was a great difference in the conduct of the Germans of West
Prussia with respect to proselytising Jesuits and Sclavonian tyranny.
The immigrant German nobles became Roman Catholic and Polish, but the
citizens and peasants remained stubborn Protestants. To the opposition
of languages was added the opposition of confessions; to the hatred of
race, the fury of contending faiths. In the century of enlightenment
there was a fanatical persecution of the Germans in these provinces;
one Protestant church after another was pulled down, the wooden ones
were burnt; when a church was burnt, the villages lost the right of
having bells; German preachers and schoolmasters were driven away and
shamefully ill-used "_Vexa Lutheranum dabit thalerum_" was the usual
saying of the Poles against the Germans. One of the great landed
proprietors of the country, Starost of Gnesen, from the family of
Birnbaum, was condemned to death, by tearing out his tongue and
chopping off his hands, because he had copied into a record from German
books some biting remarks against the Jesuits. There was no law and no
protection. The national party of Polish nobles, in alliance with
fanatical priests, persecuted most violently those whom they hated as
Germans and Protestants. All the predatory rabble joined themselves to
the patriots or confederates; they hired hordes who went plundering
about the country and fell upon small cities and German villages. Ever
more vehement became the rage against the Germans, not only from zeal
for the faith, but still more from covetousness. The Poli