federates admitted into their society only working men, day labourers, and small proprietors, as they feared the middle classes more than the great nobles. All of a sudden six thousand peasants appeared in arms in the valley of Rems. Duke Ulrich, finding his threat to whip them home had no effect, obtained the support of the middle classes by certain concessions and then fell on the peasants. He gave up entire communes to be pillaged by the lansquenets, who burnt the cottages, violated the women, and compelled the men to choose between kneeling abjectly, or having their legs cut off with a scythe. Any one who knew of a member of the Society of Poor Conrad and did not denounce him, were he father or brother, was to be put to death.
This happened in 1510; before ten years had passed away Luther, like another Prospero, had said the word that unchained the storm. It was one of those propitious moments when the powerful seem to have the making of a new world in their own hands. Ulrich von Hutten and his friend Franz von Sickingen, vainly attempting to seize the opportunity, were defeated; both died soon after, Sickingen of his wounds, Hutten apparently of chagrin.
The cause of justice which these great men had tried to make that of Germany fell once more into the hands of the poor and ignorant. A few months after Hutten's death the peasants formed the confederation called the Evangelical Brotherhood.
Not far from the borders of Bohemia is the little town of Zwickau. Here, during Luther's confinement in the Wartburg, arose the sect of the Anabaptists. This movement, which puzzled and infuriated Luther, and through his treatment of which he finally lost the greater part of his influence, is not difficult to understand. Luther had hailed the Bible as a charter of deliverance from the tyranny of Roman superstition; the Anabaptists hailed the doctrine of the inward teaching of the Holy Spirit as a deliverance from the oppression of Lutheran teaching. Both were steps in the assertion of individual liberty, both were fraught with danger, but especially that of the Anabaptists, because it was the profounder, the more universal truth. Luther by his roughness hardened the hearts of these seekers after truth, and turned mysticism into fanaticism, and a desire for justice into a cry for
