ps and far away on the
steppes of Hungary and the shores of the Euxine. To all these points the
emperor was compelled to send his troops. Year after year of carnage and
woe rolled on, during which hardly a happy family could be found in all
Europe.

"Man's inhumanity to man
Made countless millions mourn."

At last all parties became weary of the war, and none of the powers
having gained any thing of any importance by these long years of crime
and misery, for which Louis XIV., as the aggressor, is mainly
responsible, peace was signed on the 30th of October, 1697. One
important thing, indeed, had been accomplished. The rapacious Louis XIV.
had been checked in his career of spoliation. But his insatiate ambition
was by no means subdued. He desired peace only that he might more
successfully prosecute his plans of aggrandizement. He soon, by his
system of robbery, involved Europe again in war. Perhaps no man has ever
lived who has caused more bloody deaths and more wide-spread destruction
of human happiness than Louis XIV. We wonder not that in the French
Revolution an exasperated people should have rifled his sepulcher and
spurned his skull over the pavements as a foot-ball.

Leopold, during the progress of these wars, by the aid of the armies
which the empire furnished him, recovered all of Hungary and
Transylvania, driving the Turks beyond the Danube. But the proud
Hungarian nobles were about as much opposed to the rule of the Austrian
king as to that of the Turkish sultan. The Protestants gained but little
by the change, for the Mohammedan was about as tolerant as the papist.
They all suspected Leopold of the design of establishing over them
despotic power, and they formed a secret confederacy for their own
protection. Leopold, released from his warfare against France and the
Turks, was now anxious to consolidate his power in Hungary, and justly
regarding the Roman Catholic religion as the great bulwark against
liberty, encouraged the Catholics to persecute the Protestants.

Leopold took advantage of this conspiracy to march an army into Hungary,
and attacking the discontented nobles, who had raised an army, he
crushed them with terrible severity. No mercy was shown. He exhausted
the energies of confiscation, exile and the scaffold upon his foes; and
then, having intimidated all so that no one dared to murmur, declared
the monarchy of Hungary no longer elective but hereditary, like that of
Bohemia. He even had t