were carried out with relentless rigour, and a desperate flight of the Huguenots ensued. Many thousands had been forced to emigrate by the dragonnades, but now the flight became wholesale, though every effort to check it was made by the authorities. Vauban, who wrote a year after the revocation, estimated the loss of France at 100,000 inhabitants, 60,000,000 francs in specie, 9,000 sailors, 12,000 veterans, 600 officers, and her most flourishing branches of manufacture and trade. Sismondi considers the loss to have exceeded 300,000 men, while some modern estimates put the number lost during the whole period of the persecution at not less than 1,000,000. A large number abjured their religion, but a remnant remained who neither fled nor abjured, and whose endurance and determination during the long years of persecution that followed form one of the most remarkable of the records of religious history. The loss of France was the enrichment of other lands, and England, America, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, and Holland all profited by the advent of the emigrants. It is estimated that during the ten years that followed the revocation nearly 80,000 of the Huguenots established themselves in England, and their influence upon the trade and manufactures of the country was both widespread and lasting. The long windows of the silk-weavers' houses still mark the quarter of Spitalfields, London, where not so very long since a considerable French colony, with English assistants, drove a thriving trade, though not a weaver is now to be found there.

The majority of the Huguenots, however, became merged in the general population of England, and their descendants heartily accepted the change of nationality. Many of the latter have since attained to eminence in their adopted country, and are to be found among the leaders of the nation in all branches of its activity. Similar results may be traced in other nations where the refugees took up their abode, and it is said that when the Emperor of Germany rode into Paris at the head of his victorious troops at the close of the war in 1871, not less than eighty members of his personal staff were descendants of the Huguenots who had been driven by persecution from France.

During the early part of the eighteenth century the rigour of the persecution was maintained, but gradually the spirit of the age began to be averse to such methods of maintaining the power of the priesthood, and the interference of Voltaire, after the judicial murder of John Calas, did much towards bringing the persecution to an end. In 1787 an edict of Louis XVI. restored civil rights to the Huguenots, and the Revolution of 1789 and the passing later of the Code Napoleon gave them equal rights with Roman Catholics. At the present time the Protestants of France number about 500,000, and many of their pastors receive a small salary from the state. They nevertheless enjoy a considerable amount of self-government, and they have an excellent reputation as industrious and orderly citizens. In the Protestant churches of France, as in those of other countries, there is a tendency to divide over the questions arising from the progress of scriptural and historical criticism. Some of the leaders are well known for the liberalism of their ideas, and for the work they have done in connection with the advancement of the science of theology, while others, fearing the Rationalizing tendencies of modern studies, cling more closely to the Calvinistic standards of their forefathers. [See "History of the Rise of the Huguenots," by Prof. M. Baird, 1880.]

End of Vol. I.