George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 2, 17th edition.

‘ [179] extremity the vain-glorious fools who delay their con-

Chap. XIII.}

version to the last?’ What need of describing the stripes, the roastings by slow fires, the plunging into wells, the gashes from knives, the wounds from red-hot pincers, and all the cruelties employed by men who were only forbidden not to ravish nor to kill? The loss of lives cannot be computed. How many thousands of men, how many thousands of children and women, perished in the attempt to escape, who can tell? An historian has asserted that ten thousand perished at the stake, or on the gibbet and the wheel.¹

But the efforts of tyranny were powerless. Truth enjoys serenely her own immortality; and opinion, which always yields to a clearer conviction, laughs violence to scorn. The unparalleled persecution of vast masses of men for their religious creed, occasioned but a new display of the power of humanity; the Calvinists preserved their faith over the ashes of their churches, and the bodies of their murdered ministers. The power of a brutal soldiery was defied by whole companies of faithful men, that still assembled to sing their psalms; and from the country and the city, from the comfortable homes of wealthy merchants, from the abodes of a humbler peasantry, from the workshops of artisans, hundreds of thousands of men rose up, as with one heart, to bear testimony to the indefeasible, irresistible right to freedom of mind.

Every wise government was eager to offer a refuge to the upright men who would carry to other countries the arts, the skill in manufactures, and the wealth of France. Emigrant Huguenots put a new aspect on the north of Germany, where they constituted towns and sections of cities, introducing manufactures before