easures to prevent the
people from being contaminated with French ideas. The press was crushed
by severe penalties. Every enlightened idea was banished from the
schools and expunged from the school-books. Only men for whose extreme
reactionary spirit the police could vouch were appointed to the
professorships or to other offices. A system of universal spying and
secret information caused everybody to be suspected and to suffer from
private vindictiveness, while those who dared to avow liberal views were
the objects of cruel persecution.

FOOTNOTES:

[28] From Vambery's _Hungary_, in Story of the Nations Series (New York:
G. P. Putnam's Sons), by permission.

SIEGE AND SURRENDER OF YORKTOWN

A.D. 1781

HENRY B. DAWSON LORD CORNWALLIS

After almost seven years of struggle, the American colonies,
with the aid of France, won by the success of their arms
that independence which they declared in 1776. The close of
the Yorktown campaign with the surrender of Cornwallis
virtually ended the Revolutionary War.

While the victory of the Americans over Burgoyne at Saratoga
(1777) produced a most encouraging effect upon the colonies,
their scattered forces still had much arduous work before
them. The defeat of Washington at Brandywine and at
Germantown (September and October, 1777) left the British,
under Howe, in possession of Philadelphia. Being in no
condition to keep the field, Washington went into winter
quarters at Valley Forge, twenty miles northwest of that
city. There, in the most inhospitable surroundings, the army
remained from the middle of December, 1777, suffering untold
privations, while the British passed a winter of gayety in
Philadelphia. The American camp consisted of log huts with
windows of oiled paper. The soldiers built the huts in
bitter weather, their only food being cakes of flour and
water which they baked at the open fires. To the hardships
of exposure were added the sufferings of disease; to
scarcity of provisions, lack of clothing. The men, said
Lafayette, "were in want of everything; they had neither
coats, hats, shirts, nor shoes; their feet and their legs
froze till they became black, and it was often necessary to
amputate them."

After such a winter it seems remarkable that Washington
could have so strengthened his army as to win