Show 0 Proposed an Ideal German Utopia Back in Year 1521 Four hundred years ago gO a German Franciscan named Johann Eberlin of wrote an Idealistic constitution for the Germans an ordinance or for a sort of Utopia which he be called Tender reasonable full of sense and tolerance it did away with both imperial and canon law abolished Judgeships and advocacies tolerated ed Jews and heathens heresy beresy hunting made education compulsory for children forbade th the erection of immoderately costly buildings other than public ed edl flees abolished war for purposes o of extending or aggrandizing our land allowed cards and dicing bu but only for small stated stakes authorized au three hours houri of village dancing ing each week required that n no business establishment employ more more than three hands and provided provid ed that every governor from the village vII vil lage headman to the king should be elected and should legislate only by the advice and with the consent of his local or national council Justice and sanity inform every line of this brief and simple document docu ment this text for the governance of f a rural hamlet drafted to display the world in which an individual pr pre t to live And no individual German or other living in a German Ger man village in the year ear 1521 would woul have have- lived unhappily under th the laws of this modest Solon But 1521 happened to be a culm nant year in Europe It was th the year in which Luther was condemned con by the Diet at Worms Th The dynamite contained in more than tha three centuries of cf struggles between betwee empire and papacy in three cen of exploitation of the pIous plou Germans by a cynical and voracious episcopate suddenly exploded I In Inthis this year and the Germans were started on a career of brutal and religious warfare which trough brought them two whole centuries of darkness dark ness and misery Not what the Individual Eberlin designed and desired but what th the accumulated past made constituted the substance of Refer matlon politics and what the then the dominant stratum of German ety the ety-the the princes designed and desired de sired how the political politic problems would be met |