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 were to be organised under a city, and each ten cities under a Duke or Prince. One of the Princes was to be elected King, but he, like every subordinate officer, was to be guided by an elected Council. In this scheme town was throughout subordinate to country; half the members of the Councils were to be peasants and half nobles, and agriculture was pronounced the noblest means of sustenance. Capitalist organisations were abolished; the importation of wine and cloth was forbidden, and that of corn only conceded in time of scarcity; and the price of wine and bread was to be fixed. Only articles of real utility were to be manufactured, and every form of luxury was to be suppressed. Drastic measures were proposed against vice, and drunkards and adulterers were to be punished with death. All children were to be taught Latin, Greek, Hebrew, astronomy, and medicine.

This Utopian scheme was too fanciful even for the most imaginative peasant leaders, but their proposals grew rapidly more extravagant. The local demand for the abolition of seigneurial rights gave place to universal ideas of liberty, fraternity, equality; and it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the German peasants in 1525 anticipated most of the French ideas of 1789. The Twelve Articles of the Elsass peasants went beyond the originals of Memmingen in demanding not only the popular election of pastors but of all officials, and the right of the people to repudiate or recognise princely authority. So, too, the peasants' parliament at Meran in the Tyrol insisted that all jurisdictions should be exercised by persons chosen by the community. It was perhaps hostility to the Princes rather than perception of national needs that prompted the agitation for the reduction of all Princes to the status of lieutenants of the Emperor, who was to be recognised as the one and only sovereign ruler; but the conception of a democratic Empire had taken strong hold of the popular imagination. Hipler and Weigant, two of the clearest thinkers of the revolution, suggested writing to Charles and representing the movement as aimed at two objects dear to his heart, the reformation of his Church and the subjection of the Princes to obedience to the Empire. They, no less than the English, preferred a popular despotism to feudal anarchy. Even the conservative Swabians desired the abolition of a number of petty intermediate jurisdictions; and in more radical districts the proposed vindication of the Emperor's power was coupled with the condition that it was to be wielded in the people's interest. The Kaiser was to be the minister, and his subjects the sovereign authority.

Between this ruler and his people there were to be no intervening grades of society. Equality was an essential condition of the new order of things. Nobles like the counts of Hohenlohe and Henneberg, who swore through fear the oath imposed by the rebels, were required to dismantle their castles, to live in houses like peasants and burghers, to eat the same food and wear the same dress; they were even forbidden to