The-papacy-its-history-dogmas-genius-and-prospects-wylie

;ii-isINFLUENCE OP POPERY ON GOVERNMENT.now exterminated,—drowned in blood. Crime unparalleled!The French statesman would have said, folly unparalleledand in sooth it was so. It was the flower of their subjectswhich these princes had destroyed. The towns theyhad converted into smoking ruins were the seats of tradeand industry. The men whose blood dyed the soil and therivers of their land were the stay of order. The vast armamentsand the successive wars maintained by these zealousvassals of Rome inferred enormous expense. This doubledamage,—the direct cost and the indirect loss,—drowned indebt and permanently crippled all the states of Europe.Philip II. of Spain, " a beast of priestly burden,"" is said t(Shave declared to his son, a little before his death, that hehad spent in enterprises of this sort no less a sum thanfive hundred and ninety- four millions of ducats.* The millionsthat France lavished in these crusades, and the hundredsof thousands of virtuous and industrious citizens whomshe banished from her territory, can never be accuratelytold ; but one thing is manifest, that in these proceedingsshe sowed the seeds of the frightful calamities she has sinceendured, and is now enduring. "Nearly fifty, thousandfamilies," says Voltaire, writing of the revocation of theEdict of Nantes," within the space of three years, left thekingdom, an