monasteries, beautiful churches filled with paintings and sculpture, were abandoned and suffered to go to decay; and the treasures of art were often sold for the price of old trappings. Indeed, an attempt was made to transform the beautiful palace upon the Hradschin to soldiers’ barracks.
As an offset, however, to this destructive tendency against the nation’s most cherished memorials, may be mentioned his benevolent institutions. In 1783, Joseph established the first orphan asylum; in 1784, a poorhouse; in 1786, an asylum for the deaf and dumb; in 1789, a hospital for unfortunate girls, together with a foundling asylum,—these all being in the city of Prague.
The government of Joseph, although an absolute despotism, was so tempered with benevolence that the people, doubtless, Dissatisfaction with Joseph’s Government.would have submitted to it in patience, had not the infatuated ruler gone a little too far in his paternal meddlesomeness. When Joseph forbade all costly funerals, and ordered that the money of orphans should not be put out at a higher rate of interest than three and one-half per cent, the people began to murmur; but, these murmurs gave place to loud expressions of indignation when he tried to enforce the law whereby illegitimate children shared equally in the property of their parents with those born in lawful wedlock; and surely it was a ridiculous stretch of royal authority to prohibit the sending of cakes among friends on Christmas-tide.
These petty interferences in the private life of his subjects were the immediate cause of much discontent; and when once the fault-finding spirit was aroused, it
