Chapter VIII: Front Matter (8)

There is a prevalent idea that holiness and the present time are incompatible, or rather that the holiness of which the biographers of mediæval saints admiringly tell us is out of place in this century. The mistake lies in the frame of the picture presented to us. Holiness is of all times, and is the same in substance as it ever was. If, instead of reproducing the beautiful legends of old, and restoring a sort of literary Preraphaelitism in the history of the strong and wise women of by-gone times, the modern biographer were to go to the root of the matter and bring out in strong relief the commonsense virtues, the simplicity and faithfulness to natural duties, the reliance upon God, and the single-minded purpose which distinguished the women who are known as saints, they would succeed in winning the interest of modern readers. These saints were wives, mothers, and mistresses, lived and loved, sorrowed, rejoiced, and suffered, as women have done from the wives of the patriarchs down to the good women of our own century, perhaps of our own acquaintance. They were models whom it is praiseworthy to copy—not pictures held up to our gaze as beautiful inaccessibilities. The very rudeness of life then should make them more human in our eyes; they made mistakes with good intentions; they had predilections which savored of weakness; they struggled through temptations to final perfection—for saintship implies, not the glorification of every act they ever did, but the general state of their life and soul after they had suffered and conquered in the fight that we all have to wage with the world, the flesh, and the devil. Of the striking incidents of a saint’s life it is best to judge as one would of those in the life of any other personage of by-gone ages—that is, according to the standard of the age in which he or she lived; of the root-virtues which won the saint’s canonization: by the everlasting standard of the Ten Commandments. There is no more mischievous error, nor one more likely to blind us to the good we can draw from the lives of men and women who have gone before us, than the view which sets a barrier between historic holiness and every-day life at the present day.

Hedwige lived in times which had their share of wars, invasions, pestilences, and other such stirring events: Poland and Germany were in a stormy state, and the fate of many of her own family was peculiarly stormy; indeed, hardly a sensational drama of our day could deal in more violent incidents than did the half century through which she lived. Her sister Agnes became the wife of Philip, King of France, in place of his lawful but divorced wife, Ingeburga, and incurred not only personal excommunication as an adulteress, but was the cause of the French kingdom being laid under an interdict for more than a year. Her elder sister Gertrude, Queen of Hungary, was assassinated by a political faction in the absence of her husband, who had left her regent. Her two brothers, Henry and Egbert (the latter Bishop of Bamberg), were the accomplices of Otho of Wittelsbach, the suitor of Hedwige’s only daughter, in the murder of Philip, the Emperor of Germany, whom he slew to revenge himself for the warning the emperor had given the Duke of Silesia against the would-be suitor of the young princess; for Otho was as cruel as he was brave. For this deed the Electors at Frankfort degraded the brothers from their dignities, titles, and possessions, after which Henry exiled himself to the Holy Land, where he fought the Saracens for twenty years, and Egbert fled to Hungary, where the queen, his sister, gave him a home and shelter for the rest of his life. Otho was beheaded, his head thrown into the Danube and his body exposed to the birds and beasts of the forest.

But the punishment of treason did not end here; Hedwige’s home was destroyed by the indignant avengers of the emperor, and her father’s heart was broken at the news of his son’s crime; so that of the old cradle-land of the family nothing but smoking ruins and sad memories remained, while a few years later she saw her two sons, Henry and Conrad, meet in deadly conflict as the heads of two rival parties in the duchy, the latter defeated and pursued by his brother, and only saved by his father to die a few days later from a fall when out hunting. Her husband and her remaining son died within three years of each other, the latter in battle against the invading Tartars; and, what no doubt pierced her heart still more, her husband was excommunicated for retaining church property in provinces which he claimed as his by right of the testament of the Duke of Gnesen and Posen. The early death of three other children must have been but a slight sorrow compared with these trials, and the peaceful life of her sister Matilda, Abbess of Kitzingen, and of her daughter Gertrude, second abbess of Trebnitz—the same who escaped becoming the bride of “Wild Otho,” as he was called—could not but have made her envy it at times. She had had in her youth an inclination towards the monastic life, but gave it up at her parents’ desire, and married, according to the customs of her time and class, at the childish age of twelve. But she had seemed from her infancy marked out for no common lot; she was grave, sedate, and womanly; she felt her marriage to be a mission and the beginning of duties; she saw at a glance the state of neglect and uncivilization and the need of betterment in which her adopted country stood, and set about imbuing her husband with her ideas concerning improvement. He was only eighteen, and loved her truly, so he proved to be her first disciple. She began by learning Polish, which her husband’s sister Adelaide taught her, and then gathered all the inmates of the palace, to teach them prayers and the chief doctrines of the faith, in which they were very imperfectly instructed, although full of readiness, even eagerness, to believe. Her father-in-law, the reigning duke, fully appreciated her worth and respected her enthusiasm. Her husband joined her in plans for founding monasteries and building churches when it should come to his turn to reign over Silesia; and in the meanwhile she strove to teach the nobles and the people a greater respect for the priesthood by herself setting the example of outward deference towards priests, whether native or foreign, ignorant or learned. The strangers she always asked to the palace, gave them clothes and money for their journey, attended their Masses, and sometimes served them at table.

In order to introduce clerical learning and morals into Silesia and Poland, it was necessary to rely upon Germans, as has often been the case in other countries, where a foreign element has been, for some time at least, synonymous with civilization. In England Italians chiefly, in a less degree Normans, and in one signal instance a Greek,[12] brought with them the knowledge of church architecture and chant, besides secular learning; Irish missionaries had before that helped on the Britons, and Saxons, later on, carried the same influence across the sea to heathen Germany, who in her turn became the evangelizer of the Slav nations. Still later, when Poland was as fervent a Catholic country as Germany, another Hedwige (the name had then grown to be a national one) converted the Lithuanians and became the mother of the Jagellon dynasty. Here, on the confines of Russia, the Latin Church stood face to face with the Greek, and the tide of progress and conversion was stayed. Then came the perpetual turmoils with the warlike Turks, till religion became rather an affair of the knight than of the missionary, until that wave of circumstances having passed away, and the Turks having sunk from the height of their military renown to the insignificance of a mongrel and undisciplined crowd, the battle between faith and scepticism—the modern form of heathenism—has shifted to a great degree to the arena of the mind. The Lepanto of our day is being fought out as obstinately on paper as that of three hundred years ago was on sea; of its nature it cannot be as short or as decisive, but it is nevertheless the counterpart—and the only worthy one—of that romantic and daring feat of arms. The struggle in the days of Hedwige was in some sense much narrower; but though her husband and son engaged in it rather as blind instruments than far-seeing directors, she, with the instincts of her sex and her habitual union with God, helped in it as a teacher and missionary. She proved her gift for it first upon her household, then, in the years of her retirement, upon her special charge—some young heathen girls, natives of Prussia, whom she taught herself and provided for in life. One of these, Catherine, to whom she was godmother, she married to her trusty chamberlain, Schavoine, and left them the estate of that name after her death. But notwithstanding her thirst for doing good and her high idea of her duty to her subjects, she thoroughly enjoyed the quiet of home-life, away from the court, and, whenever it was practicable, would spend some weeks at a time with her young husband and her children at Lähnhaus. It is here that her memory lives freshest at present; here that she tended her dovecot, which is brought to mind by the yearly market of doves, unique of its kind, still held at Lähn on Ash-Wednesday; here that she and her favorite doe crossed the Hedwigsteig, a rough, rocky pathway, to the Chapel of the Hermit and the image of the Blessed Virgin, which afterwards became a pilgrimage-shrine, where the neighboring peasants came to see her and unite in her prayers, so that the present village dates back to the huts of branches hastily put up around the spreading tree that formerly protected the image; here that she rested on the Hedwigstein, or moss-grown boulder, yet remaining, with her name attached to it; here that she built a chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas, and established some Benedictine monks; and here that in her later years she received the confidence of her friend, Baroness Jutta of Liebenthal, a pious widow, who founded the monastery of that name for Benedictine nuns and the education of young girls, and herself became its first abbess.

Duke Henry, when he came to be sovereign, did not forget his plans and promises, but helped her generously in the endowment of her hospitals, churches, and monasteries. Himself the son of a German princess, he had great faith in the influence for good, in morals, in agriculture, in learning, of his mother’s and his wife’s countrymen; and, according to the custom of the time, Hedwige was accompanied on her journey to Silesia, as a bride, by an escort of German knights, who were not to compose a separate court or household for her, but to settle in the country and make it their home. Such immigration, of course, had its sad as well as its good side; it led to jealousies that were neither unnatural nor inexcusable, although it also leavened the country with some useful and healthy habits. It was on this delicate question that her two sons quarrelled so violently as to make it the pretext of a civil war; Conrad, the youngest, being passionately attached to the old Polish customs and not discriminating between these and crying abuses, while Henry, the eldest, inherited his father’s love for the Germans. The old nobility formed a powerful party and rallied round Conrad, hailing him as their future national sovereign, although his father was still alive and his elder brother the acknowledged heir. Henry the Bearded had by that time retired from public life, and divided his possessions between his two sons, giving the eldest the city of Breslau and all Middle and Lower Silesia, while the youngest received the provinces of Leubus and Lausitz. The latter were less cultivated than the former, but this was chiefly due to that want of, or remoteness from, German influence and immigration; so that the father, knowing his sons’ opposite views on this subject, hoped to satisfy each by his partition. Conrad, however, resented the gift of a less civilized and extended territory, and took this pretext to make war on his brother, with the result already noted.

The retirement of Henry, the husband of Hedwige, which lasted for twenty years or more, was the result of a strange form of piety and self-renunciation not uncommon in the middle ages. The Duke and Duchess of Silesia had been married twenty-three years, and had had six children, three of whom died in infancy. A little after the birth of the youngest, in 1209, Hedwige, still in the bloom of her years (she was only thirty-five and her husband forty-one), and after many prayers and struggles, felt herself impelled to dedicate the rest of her life to God only, and, with her husband’s consent, to live separate from him. They had always loved each other tenderly, and Henry’s conduct, unlike that of many sovereigns of his and of later times, had been irreproachable; he looked upon his wife as a saint, and upon her wishes as commands; he had allowed her to guide his charities and public improvements, had followed her advice, had trusted to her to bring up his children exactly as she thought fit, which was more rigorously and less luxuriously than is often the case with royal children—in a word, had leant wholly upon her. To signify his full acquiescence in this half-monastic vow, he received the tonsure, and, contrary to the custom of his class at that time, let his beard grow, whence came his surname, the Bearded.

Hedwige retired to Trebnitz, where she lived in a separate house with her own women and the chamberlain Schavoine, who took his name from the estate which Henry gave her on their separation. Other grants of money were also made her, and her husband promised his countenance and help in any good work she should wish to do there or elsewhere throughout his possessions. They often met in after years, generally at festive ceremonies for the building or opening of churches, and once at the grave of their unhappy son Conrad; and Henry himself, though keeping up a court and moving from place to place, betook himself to prayers, study, and good works, having given over the government to his sons. In his old age he came forth again in the character of a sovereign and a leader, and, indeed, led a stormy, stirring life for a few years before his death.

Hedwige, in this proceeding of her retirement, had another object in view—that is, the example which she hoped her voluntary giving up of married life would be to the married priesthood of Poland and Silesia. Such was, to a great extent, the case, and the celibacy of the clergy, so long preached in vain, became in a few years the rule instead of the exception.

The Cistercian abbey of Trebnitz, now Hedwige’s home, was the first institution of its kind for women. It was begun in 1200 and finished eighteen years later, but was ready to be inhabited in 1202. It stood in a wooded region, three miles from Breslau. The legend of its foundation, as commemorated in an old rhyme or _Volkslied_ (people’s song), refers it to a vow made by Henry, who, while out hunting, got entangled in a morass and could see no human means of rescue; but what is certain is that the royal couple had long planned and looked forward to a monastery for women, and the date of the laying of the first stone of Trebnitz corresponds with that of Henry’s accession to the throne. The building was intended to accommodate a thousand persons, and was built by the hands of convicts and prisoners, even those who were condemned to death, whose work on it was to be equivalent to the rest of their sentence. Hedwige’s pity for, and kindness to, captives, whether innocent or guilty, was a conspicuous trait of her character; and the undeserved physical hardships of prisoners in those times were enough to turn the sympathies of every kind-hearted person from justice towards the criminal. In the same way did the neglected sick, and especially the lepers, touch her heart; indeed, all the oldest hospitals in Silesia are due to her.

The neighboring Cistercian monks of Leubus cast the leaden plates for the roof and the smaller bells of the new monastery, in return for which Henry gave them two estates; and the duke himself with his foremost nobles inspected the progress of the work, and solemnly made the round of the land deeded to the institution, marking his own name on the boundary stones. Bishop Egbert of Bamberg, Hedwige’s brother (this was before his disgrace), procured a body of Cistercian nuns of his diocese as a beginning, and accompanied them himself on their journey to their new home. Hedwige’s great-uncle, Provost Popo of Bamberg, came too, and the meeting of these strangers with the high clergy of Silesia and Poland was, as the old chroniclers would have said, “a brave and pleasant sight.” The buildings were decorated with evergreens, and the pomp of jewelled garments, clerical and national costumes, armor, horses richly caparisoned, embroidered robes and canopies, was dazzling. It was the Sunday within the octave of the feast of the Epiphany—a sharp, bright winter’s day; the cavalcade from the court of Breslau, consisting of the duke and duchess and their retinue, escorted the nuns and the foreign ecclesiastics, while the bishops of Breslau and Posen, each with his chapter, and the Cistercian abbot under whose jurisdiction Trebnitz was placed, received the latter at the gate of the finished portion of the new church. Here the duke handed the Abbess Petrussa, Hedwige’s old friend and teacher, a deed of the property henceforth belonging to the order—a document which, like all following ones of the same kind, ended with a forcible denunciation of any future injury to the rights of the abbey. “Whoever injures this foundation, without giving full satisfaction therefor, shall be cut off from the church; and let his everlasting portion be with Judas, the Lord’s betrayer, who hanged himself, and with Dathan and Abiron whom the earth swallowed up alive.”

When the deed had been read, and the dedication of the building “to the honor of God and of the holy apostle Bartholomew” declared, the clergy, who held torches in their hands, threw them on the ground, as a sign of all secular claims on the possessions of the abbey being extinguished; and during this ceremony the solemn excommunication against all who should injure the monastery was read aloud once more. The men who had worked at the building, or in any way contributed to it, were freed from all feudal claims, from the obligation to fight, to furnish huntsmen, falcons, or horses for the ducal household, to work at the fields or at the public works, and received the immunities and protection usual to the vassals of a monastery.

Although Trebnitz was undoubtedly named after the neighboring village so called, a story grew up of the humorous mispronunciation of a Polish word, _trzebanic_, by the German abbess, when asked by Henry if “there was anything else she needed?” The word signifies “We need nothing more,” and has some likeness to the name of Trebnitz; but popular tales such as this abound everywhere. Among the later gifts to the monastery were three villages, bound to supply the nuns with honey, wax, and mead—the first for their “vesper-meal,” the second for their candles and torches, and the third for their “drink on holidays.” The object of the institution, which the original deed set forth as being the securing of “a place of refuge wherein the weaker sex may atone for its sins through the mercy of God,” was at once obtained, and other advantages also grew up around the women’s republic of Trebnitz. It was soon filled with young girls sent there to be educated; widows came either to enter the order or to live under its rule and protection as out-door members; women fled there to repent, and others to avoid temptation; and lastly came Gertrude, the duke’s daughter, to become a nun within its walls. Seven years after its festive opening Hedwige herself retired there and began the second half of her long life by caring for and educating the heathen maidens from Prussia. Trebnitz was her favorite home until her death, and the institution which was most identified with the holy Duchess of Silesia; but the list of great works she and her husband set on foot, each of them a starting-point of much hidden good, is a long one. The parish church of Bunzlau having, with most of the town itself, been burnt, she built a new one, dedicated to Our Lady. At Goldberg, a village near one of the royal summer palaces, she founded a Franciscan convent, intended to serve the purpose of a school for the neighborhood. Nimptsch, her place of refuge during the civil war between her two sons, was not forgotten; for while there she laid the first stone of a church, and almost at the same time began one dedicated to St. Andrew for the town of Herrnstadt. Her friends often remarked on her lavishness in building, and asked her whence she could expect to draw the means. She used to answer confidently: “I trust that the heavenly Architect who made the world, and my dear and faithful husband Henry, will not let me be shamed, so that I should be unable to finish what I have begun with good motives and to their honor. Do not be too anxious about my doings; all will end well with God’s help.” In Breslau, the capital, she built three hospitals—that of the Holy Ghost, that of St. Lazarus (this was for lepers), and that of St. Barbara. For many years Hedwige’s charity towards the sick had produced a rivalry among all good men, both nobles and burghers, to tend and care for some sick persons in their own houses or in rooms hired or built for the purpose; but her wish always was to found a public hospital. The duke gave her a suitable piece of land for the building and garden; the abbot of the Augustinians, Witoslaus, gave his lay brothers as sick-nurses and his choir-monks as overseers and confessors. Contributions flowed in from the rich members of the population, and the first hospital was finished in a very short time. The third contained what was an immense luxury in those days—a number of bath-rooms, open gratis to the poor on certain days, and rooms where they could be bled, as was the custom on the slightest illness. All those who came in contact with Hedwige caught her spirit of generosity, and rich men, lay and ecclesiastic, vied with her in founding churches and monasteries. Canon Nicholas of Breslau, the duke’s chancellor, obtained Henry’s leave to endow a Cistercian monastery with the estates which the duke had given him for his lifetime, and others followed his example.

These ceremonies were always solemn and the deed of gift publicly read, signed, witnessed, and sworn to. As much pomp hedged them in as was usual in a treaty of peace or the betrothal of sovereign princes; and, indeed, the foundation of churches, though a common occurrence, was looked upon as quite as important as any civil contract. In 1234 a terrible famine, fever, and pestilence decimated the land, and, among many other Silesian towns that possessed as yet no hospital, Neumarkt was in special distress. Hedwige hurried there and set on foot a temporary system of relief and nursing, but also entreated her husband to build a permanent hospital for incurables, where they might be cared for till their death. This he did, and attached to it a provostship, the church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, and Pope Innocent IV. sent special blessings to the Bohemian Benedictine monks who were entrusted with the care of the sick. Four years later Henry built a church in Löwenberg and gave it to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem; this was a month or two before his death. But these are only a few of the works of this generous couple. Many villages and remote places obtained benefits from them, travelling priests were cared for, young girls helped in their need and protected or dowered, many poor families housed and fed; and the famine of 1234 especially gave Hedwige an opportunity of justifying her title of “Mother of the poor.” She distributed unheard-of quantities of grain, bread, meat, and dried fruits to the people, who came for relief from long distances. She gave lavishly, with that apparent recklessness that marks the charities of saints, smilingly saying, “We must help the poor, that the Lord may have pity on our own needs and appease our own hunger.” She forgave all feudal dues for years on her own possessions, and looked after her employés so diligently that they complained that the “duchess left them nothing but the leavings of the peasants.” When she did not distribute her alms in person, the poor groaned and wept, and cared less for the charity than if it had been seasoned by her gracious presence. When Breslau was wholly burnt down in 1218, and three years’ distress fell upon the land, she did the same and relieved thousands. That year was marked by the death of the Abbess of Trebnitz, Petrussa, and the choice of Princess Gertrude as her successor, which coincided with the festival held to celebrate the entire finishing of the monastery and the dedication of the church. The religious ceremonies were followed by a banquet in the refectory and by games for the people in the courtyard. Henry was present and rejoiced with her; her son’s wife, Anna, daughter of King Ottokar of Bohemia, was there with her children, one of whom was to fill, but unworthily, the throne of Silesia. It was a family gathering as well as a religious feast; but if, as tradition says, Hedwige was then gifted with a more than ordinary insight into the future, she must have felt sad to think of the turmoil that was coming and that would part her more and more in spirit from her husband.

After the death of his second son, Conrad, Henry turned his arms against a relation of his own, Duke Ladislaus of Gnesen and Posen, and came off victorious. His old warrior-blood once again stirred in him, it was impossible to keep him from the excitement of war, and Hedwige’s entreaties and messages were of no avail. She feared the excommunication which Pope Innocent had more than once threatened to launch against the restless Polish sovereigns, and was relieved when he undertook a war against the Prussians, who at least were heathens, and whose cruelties really needed strong repression. Still, it was rather the thirst for fighting that led the Duke of Silesia against them than any exalted motive of justice or desire to open the way for their conversion.

The pretext for the expedition was the cruelties they committed on their inroads into Poland, and especially the duchy of Masovia. To attack them among their own forests and morasses was so hopelessly difficult that the bishops, whom the pope had admonished to preach a “crusade” against them, had hitherto refrained from doing so. The event proved the wisdom of this inaction; for after marching a large army over the border, under the command of Henry of Silesia and Duke Conrad of Masovia, with whom the bishops with their men-at-arms joined forces, the assailers found themselves in a network of marshes, behind which the assailed quietly waited. The wearied troops had at last to be ingloriously marched back again, while the enemy came out in their rear, made a raid into Masovia, carried off five thousand Christian captives, burnt a thousand villages and hamlets as well as almost every church in the province, and drove Duke Conrad into Germany for refuge. Henry then advised the fugitive duke to call upon the German Knights of Venice, a military order who afterwards under their grand master, Hermann Balk, settled in Kulmerland and effectually routed and conquered the Prussians. The conversion of the latter was, therefore, a feat of arms rather than a triumph of missionary zeal; and perhaps it was less to be wondered at that, after only three hundred years’ Christianity, they should have accepted another change in the shape of the Lutheran Reformation. The order itself, however, was more blamable, in that it departed, in the person of its head, the famous Albert of Brandenburg, from its old chivalric standard of honor, and went over to the “new doctrine,” as it was called, because this defection promised political independence. And, again, it strikes one, in reading of these thirteenth-century feuds, that history repeats itself; for a new religious war has sprung up between Prussia and Posen, and the two civilized races are in much the same relative positions, speaking broadly, as the two barbarous ones were then, although Posen can point to a short and dazzling career between the two eras of persecution.

It is impossible here to recount the various and sad events that led up to the death of Henry. He died in 1238, at the age of seventy, under the ban of excommunication, which was only partially removed, and deprived to the last of the presence of his saintly wife. The scene of the return of his body to the abbey church at Trebnitz was heartrending. The nuns and vassals, no less than his widow and children, looked upon him as their stay and their protector; they bewailed him with genuine grief as their benefactor, and buried him with all imaginable respect and pomp as their founder. Hedwige’s life as a widow became more penitential than before.

After her death a hair-shirt and a belt with small, sharp points turned inwards were found on her body; but these she had worn for many years before her widowhood. Her cloister-life, however, was not her only one, for she watched with intelligent interest the politics of the time, the great events, and even the less obtrusive details, whose consequences to the cause of good might afterwards be manifold; and above all she lived in her son, Henry the Pious, a worthy and able sovereign, whose reign was to be short, stormy, and glorious.

In January, 1241, the Tartars, under their chiefs Batu and Peta, having previously desolated Russia, fell with nearly three hundred thousand fighting men upon Bohemia, Hungary, Silesia, and Poland. The King of Hungary, Bela, was beaten by Batu, while Peta besieged, took, and burnt Cracow on his way to Silesia. The King of Bohemia, Wenzel, brought as large an army as he could to defend his frontiers, while Henry gathered thirty thousand men in his father’s city of refuge, Liegnitz, waiting to attack Peta on his road to Breslau. Trebnitz was in dire confusion; monasteries always fell the first prey to the heathen invaders, and the nuns judged it prudent to scatter themselves and claim each the protection of her own family, while Hedwige, with her daughter, the Abbess Gertrude, and her daughter-in-law, Anna, shut themselves up in the strong castle of Crossen on the Oder. Before she left she gave her son a scarf, or rather sword-belt, embroidered with her own hands, which he received as an omen of good-fortune, cheering her with hopes of his speedy and victorious return, while the stricken, heroic mother feared but too surely that she should never see his face again. All Breslau retired within the citadel to await the attack, and Henry tried to intercept the foe on his way. He drew up his army on some high ground just outside the walls—Wahlstatt, a good battle-ground, as he judged—and himself gave the signal to attack the oncoming foe. He commanded the main body, while lesser brother-sovereigns directed the wings; but the irresistible might of numbers, which was the chief reliance of the Tartars, bore down all opposition, as a whirlwind does the densest forest. The Poles and Silesians fell like heroes, defending themselves and asking no quarter, until a cry arose in German, “Strike dead! strike dead!” which, whether raised by accident or by treachery, produced a panic by its likeness to the Polish word for “Fly! fly!” The army seemed literally to melt away; squadrons broke and ran, and a cloud of small, sharp Tartar arrows clove the air after them; the Asiatic cavalry hunted and trampled down the fugitives. One of the Polish leaders at last succeeded in rallying part of the troops, and the fight began again with some hopes of victory, when the enemy had resort to a kind of infernal machine used in ancient Indian warfare, the likeness of a gigantic head, which was so made as to give out a dense smoke and unbearable stench, besides being in some degree explosive. The contrivance was held by the Christians to be magical and devilish, and the Tartars themselves, so dangerous was it to those of their own men who had the handling of it, only resorted to it in the utmost extremity, which shows how hard-pressed they were on this occasion by the Silesian soldiery. But the terrible device stood them in good stead this time. The panic was renewed, and once more a wild flight and wilder pursuit took place; the leaders, the knights, and Henry himself, regardless of the flight of their followers, fought on long after they knew their fate to be hopeless and death certain. One by one the brave fellows were cut down, the little band decreased at every stroke of sword or flight of arrows, and the duke, with four knights, found himself almost alone on the lost field of battle. They urged him to try to save his life by flight; he scouted the proposal, and told them that since God had not willed that he should conquer, he would at least die. “For the faith,” he said; “at least, it will be a martyr’s death.” His charger was killed under him, and he fought on foot for some time, hewing a lane for himself through his enemies. One of his knights managed at last to bring him a fresh horse, which he had no sooner mounted than his person was recognized by hundreds of his foes and he was hemmed in on all sides. While in the act of lifting his sword to cut down a Tartar in his front, he was wounded from behind by a long lance thrust in precisely where a joint in his armor exposed the shoulder; the spear went right through and pierced the lung, and the son of Duchess Hedwige sank dying from his horse. The enemy cut off his head, and, hoisting it on a spear, paraded it before the walls of Liegnitz, summoning the defenders to surrender; but they, guarding Henry’s young sons, answered back from the battlements: “If we have lost one duke to-day, we have four yet with us in the castle, and these we will defend to the last drop of our hearts’ blood.” The next day they were relieved by King Wenzel of Bohemia, who, however, came too late to do anything but hasten the departure of the Tartar horde, which had suffered severely in the encounter, but rallied soon enough to maraud, burn, and sack churches, abbeys, villages, etc., throughout Hungary and Silesia, Bohemia and Mähren, until, one year later, Jaroslaus von Sternberg finally routed their diminished army under the walls of Olmütz. This roused Germany and France, and the Christian sovereigns combined sent a mighty army, under the command of Wenzel of Bohemia, to defend the Austro-Hungarian frontiers, whence the Tartars retreated, by the same road by which they had come, to their steppes on the high table-lands of Asia. Their traces in Europe, however, were not blotted out for half a century; the ruined churches, blackened villages, and ravaged fields long showed their awful track; and the outward work of Hedwige’s life would have been well-nigh destroyed had not the spirit she had brought with it remained alive as the germ of a future exterior restoration.

The night of the lost battle, when Henry’s headless body lay on the field, Hedwige, after a prayer of unusual length, woke her nearest friend and favorite attendant, and said to her:

“Demundis, this night I have lost my only son. He has left me as
swiftly as a bird flies upwards, and I shall never look upon his
face again.” She forbade her to say anything of this to the dead
man’s wife and sister until some messenger from the army should
bring news of the battle; and it was not till the third day that
Jaroslaus von Janowitz came with the terrible tidings. Anna,
Henry’s young widow, hastened to the field to seek and recover
her husband’s body, which was so mutilated that she only
recognized it by the six toes of the left foot. The corpse was
brought to Trebnitz and buried with his father, brother, and
infant sons in the abbey church. Hedwige prayed thus aloud over
his grave: “O Lord! I thank thee that thou hast given me such a
son, who, as long as he lived, loved and honored me truly, and
never gave me an hour’s sorrow. However gladly I would have kept
him by my side on earth, I hold him blessed in that, by the
shedding of his blood, he is now united in heaven with thee, his
Creator. With supplication, O Lord! do I commend his soul unto
thee.”

Hedwige’s life and work were drawing to an end. Her last public act was one of charity to the dead and comfort to the bereaved living. The bodies of many heroic defenders of their country had been left to rot upon the field of battle. She had these gathered together and buried in consecrated ground, and ordered solemn requiems to be sung for the repose of their souls, while she made herself accessible to every sorrowing widow, mother, sister, or orphan of the dead soldiers, listened to their complaints and laments, comforted and helped them, and brought God’s peace once more into their hearts. After this she prepared herself to die. Her first care was a practical one: she set her affairs in order—a moral duty too often foolishly confounded with worldliness. Then she redoubled her devotions, and, sending for her chaplain, asked to receive Extreme Unction. He demurred, seeing no sign of death about her; but her holiness was so well known that he asked her the reason of her request.

“It is a sacrament,” she answered reverently, “which should be received in full consciousness, that we may treat it with due reverence and thankfulness; and I fear that sickness would make me receive it with little or no preparation, and would prevent me from being, as far as possible, worthy of this dying grace. I shall belong to the sick before many days are over, and I would fain be strengthened for the passage through death to the joy of meeting my God.”

Her agony was not long, but she seemed to struggle with a fear of death and of the devil’s temptations. When her daughter wished to send for Anna, she said: “No; I shall not die before she comes home” (she was then absent on a visit to her brother, King Wenzel of Bohemia). Her biographers tell us that angels and saints visited her on her death-bed. She died with the veil of her holy niece, Elizabeth of Hungary, wound round her head, and held in her hand, and often to her lips, a little ivory image of the Blessed Virgin. At the very last she was calm and peaceful, blessed her daughter and daughter-in-law, and every nun in the monastery of Trebnitz, her chosen home, and died at evening twilight, on the 15th of October, 1243. Twenty years later the clergy of Silesia, Poland, and Bohemia sent deputies to Rome to beg for her canonization, which Pope Clement IV. proclaimed almost immediately. Many miracles through her intercession were sworn to by credible witnesses, and the neighborhood blossomed with gracious and beautiful legends of the sainted duchess, the mother of the poor and the guardian angel of Silesia. The ceremony of transferring her body to a shrine in the abbey church at Trebnitz in 1268 was the occasion for a national festival; pilgrims flocked in from the remotest districts, and many foreigners came too. Sovereigns and knights, in costly robes and armor, walked in procession to her altar; lay and ecclesiastical pomp was showered upon and around her remains; but nothing of all this was so great a tribute as the memory she left, deep in the heart of the people, of a model wife, mother, mistress, and sovereign, a woman strong in principle, truthful in every word and deed, charitable yet not weak, merciful yet not sentimental, a wise, far-seeing, but tender, brave, and thoroughly womanly woman.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE CHARACTER OF THE PRESENT INDUSTRIAL CRISIS.

FROM THE REVUE GENERALE.

Every one agrees that “business is bad”; but how many give themselves the trouble to look for the causes of this persistent stagnation? Some are distressed, others astonished, by it. The calmer observers—those who are not dismayed beyond measure by a deceptive view from the bank of the river of fortune—seek for comparisons in the crises of 1837, 1848, and 1866.

A gifted writer, who conducts with deserved success a technical magazine of our country, the “Monitor of Material Interests” (_Le Moniteur des Intérêts Matériels_), has examined this interesting subject in a series of remarkable articles. M. George de Laveleye—who must not be confounded with his relative, the professor at Liege—maintains that the present crisis is not transient. He attributes to it a permanent character. If the reader will follow attentively the summary that we are about to give of the argument of M. De Laveleye, he will not be too alarmed at his conclusion.

Generally, these crises have had the effect of rarefying the capital by which the great industrial enterprises were fed; these, then, deprived of the food which enabled them to live, seemed to hesitate; then they shook and fell. But to-day what do we see? Entirely the reverse. Money, floating capital, unused funds, are more abundant than ever; the cash-boxes overflow; the large banks literally sweat with gold; and this excess, this plethora of unemployed capital causes the public funds to advance and the price of money to decrease. It is business that is wanting; it is the employment of capital that is in default.

Whence comes this accumulation of savings and this inertia of capital, and how does it happen that new and tempting enterprises do not attract it, notwithstanding its apparently low price? M. De Laveleye thus instructs us:

“All these tempests,” says he, speaking of the crises of 1837,
1848, 1857, and 1866, “which reproduced themselves at almost
equal intervals, were periods of settlement which marked the
impatience of the industrial speculation over-excited during a
period of forty years; each time that it had abused credit, each
time that there was a disproportion between the engagements
entered upon and the available resources, industrial,
commercial, and financial Europe received a warning; credit
vanished suddenly; there was a series of commercial or
industrial failures; there was a violent contraction in the
stock exchanges and in business; there was a slackening of new
enterprises or of those already in hand; there were more losses
than one could reckon. But at each of these momentary and
transitory crises a remedy was very quickly found. Thus we had
free trade and the upward movement of commercial relations; we
had the play of free joint-stock companies; we had the war of
secession, which, from a European point of view, was a powerful
derivative; finally, during this long period we had the
discovery of gold and silver mines, coming annually to swell the
stock of metal at the disposal of business and of speculation.
Thus these crises were not of long duration. It sufficed to let
the overworked market have time to assimilate the stocks of
paper or of merchandise from which it suffered, to re-establish
the equilibrium between the current debts, circulating capital
and credit, and immediately industrial and commercial Europe
resumed her progressive march; the new enterprises which
presented themselves obtained public favor; the warning was
forgotten; the play of credit renewed itself; and after a period
of enforced quiet, which never exceeded three years, we felt
vibrating anew that febrile activity which, in forty years, has
caused a veritable transformation of the world.”

This was always the course of these crises in the past. To-day there is nothing like this; on the contrary, “if there be a disproportion between undertakings and resources, it is absolutely the reverse of that which marked the preceding crises: the undertakings are almost null, and the resources are exaggerated.”

Why? Because the present crisis is not merely a transitional crisis: it is a permanent, final one; the origin of the evil from which the industry and the commerce of Europe suffer is to be traced to other causes than those commonly attributed to it. The true origin of the crisis, says M. De Laveleye, is the withdrawal of capital from the operations in which it had been employed, and the inactivity and unproductiveness to which it has been since doomed. At the beginning of the crisis of 1873 a general panic was produced among the lenders, whose confidence was profoundly shaken, and they exerted themselves all at once to realize their money. The bankers and the money-lenders of Europe were seized, by a unanimous accord, with a desire to have their capital, or that which remained of it, in their hands—“to see their money again,” as M. De Laveleye says. They realized their foreign securities; they retired _en masse_ from the industrial enterprises in which they were engaged abroad; and, above all, they cut off credit. The countries and the establishments which lived on credit and on outside capital saw their resources cut off and suspended their activity, believing, however, that the crisis would be only temporary. The three principal lending countries—England, France, and Holland—realized their money, at the price of heavy losses on more than one occasion; and, under the influence of the panic, they contented themselves with keeping it under lock and key in their cash-boxes. From this resulted a great and rapid decline in the rate of interest. Bank paper fell to one per cent., and the lenders upon short bills, with incontestable securities, got but a half per cent. This was the result of the return of the capital drawn back from the foreign countries to which it had been lent; the capitalists had but one ambition: they wished to be certain that their money was running no risk whatever.

The result of all this was that, in every instance where they lived on borrowed capital, industrial works were stopped and all sorts of enterprises were cut short. On the other hand, a plethora of capital was produced among those who had realized, and who could no longer find means to employ their funds with profit. This is the explanation and the first characteristic of the present crisis—the accumulation of capital and the low price for the use of money.

The accumulation is general; but it is principally in the rich countries, like England and France, that this excess was produced. The same phenomenon, however, also showed itself in Austria, Italy, Sweden, etc.—countries which live in part upon foreign capital. On the other hand, the countries which depended entirely upon this capital—Turkey, Egypt, Peru, etc.—were crippled, as they were deprived of the resources which credit had previously placed at their disposal.

Thus, then, nothing happened as in the preceding crises, and from 1873 to 1877 all has been new, the phenomena themselves and their causes. There would be reason for surprise and bewilderment at this if one did not admit, with M. De Laveleye, that only now has ceased the industrial and speculative movement which has led Europe for forty years to send her money abroad. New employments for capital are very nearly exhausted; new sources of riches have been exploited as much as they can be. The movement of the last forty years, especially active since 1851, is not merely arrested for a moment to resume its march once more, as in the previous crises; it is definitely terminated.

The design of the past movement was the economical furnishing of Europe and of the world: and this equipment is completed, or nearly so. But in giving proof of this assertion and seeking for its justification, M. De Laveleye supplies a very clear account of the direct and specific causes of the crisis through which we are passing.

“Western Europe,” he says—“and by this generic expression we
mean Europe rich in capital and feeding great foreign
enterprises—Western Europe has made a rude return upon herself.
She has retaken her money; she has made an inventory of what she
possessed abroad, and she shows herself solicitous to preserve,
to keep by her, this scattered wealth. The first element of the
force of progress, then, is in default; the money is wanting; it
is hidden; it is refused. Concurrently, what have the borrowing
countries done since 1873? They have abandoned the game and
ceased an impossible struggle, which consisted in paying to
Western Europe a revenue which was not produced by the soil or
by practicable enterprises. They have become bankrupt, and the
crisis in their government funds has opened the eyes of the two
champions. Each perceived that he was ruined: the borrower by
becoming indebted without sufficient motive; the lender not only
by lending his capital upon illusory guarantees, but by
receiving finally only a part of it, under the form of
arrearages.”

This is the second cause. As for the third:

“It is the depreciation of silver, due to the incapacity and the
improvidence of the Western states, which imagined they could
make a good stroke of political economy by allowing one of the
agents of circulation to debase itself.

“Principal possessors of the stock of gold these states have
obeyed an egoistic thought in seconding the movement for a
single metal as currency—gold; a movement which had for its
first effect an increase in the relative value of their metallic
circulation. But they took no note of another very grave
consequence of this disturbance of equilibrium.

“When a nominal money submits to variations in value as great as
those which have been noted in silver, it becomes provisionally
inapt for its functions. Commercial enterprises, based upon this
metal, become extremely dangerous, and are no longer attempted
by those who wish to operate only with the security attached to
studied and matured plans. But all the commerce with the East is
based upon silver, which, for these countries, is the nominal
money. When the value of silver, and, following it, the course
of exchange, became subject to oscillations of ten and fifteen
per cent., there was no longer any security for international
commerce. The cost of despatching and of selling raw material or
manufactured goods could no longer be precisely fixed; and the
most careful merchant became a speculator in spite of himself.
He then stopped, and by that very act he added to the difficulty
of the situation. The fall in the value of silver broke the
charm exercised by the constant augmentation of the stock of
metals put at the disposal of international enterprises.

“This is the third element in the advance of progress which has
disappeared in its turn; and we may thus sum up:

“1. The lenders are not willing, provisionally, to enter upon
new schemes.

“2. The borrowers, weary or feeble, are incapable of giving
birth to new illusions.

“3. The monetary crisis has added its action to these two
negative elements.

“So that to-day, after proper deliberation, people decide to do
nothing; or, at least, to do nothing under the former conditions
of international enterprises.”

But is it admissible that we shall do nothing henceforth, and that the present situation will prolong itself indefinitely? No, assuredly; and, so far as this goes, M. De Laveleye recognizes with every one that the stagnation of business cannot endure, that a reaction is inevitable, and that it will come in its time.

“But,” he hastens to add, “this return to activity will not be
produced at all in the form known and hoped for by those who
have seen the revivals of speculation after the crises of 1837,
1857, and 1866; and this for the logical reason that the
industrial, commercial, financial, and speculative activity of
the middle of this century has had for its base and aim the
economical furnishing of the world (_l’outillage économique du
monde_), and that this furnishing is very nearly completed.

“The base and the object of the former activity will no longer
exist, or scarcely so. We must, then, wait for a profound
modification in the form and conditions of this activity.

“This is why we have called the present crisis a permanent, a
final crisis”—_une crise définitive_.