The ram rebellioneric Flint with Virginia DeMarce

Part III: The Trouble in FranconiaSo I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them.Ezekiel 37:7-8Motherhood and Apple Pie, While You're at ItVirginia DeMarce December, 1632: Grantville, ThuringiaArnold Bellamy looked at the assignment that the Congress of the New United States had given the Special Commission on the Establishment of Freedom of Religion in the Franconian Prince-Bishoprics and the Prince-Abbey of Fulda. Its members were to go to the area that King Gustavus Adolphus had assigned to be administered by Grantville the previous autumn. They were to establish a headquarters at Würzburg. There were to be regional offices in Bamberg and Fulda. They were to hold hearings. In the course of these hearings, they were, basically, to explain a number of things to the civil down-time administrative personnel of these regions. The most important were, reduced to their essence: 1) Under the Constitution of the New United States, there is Separation of Church and State;2) Religious Toleration is a Great Thing;3) Burning Witches is a Bad Idea;4) We Mean It;—and, also, added as a rider during a late afternoon committee meeting;5) Voter Registration is Good for You. Congress had passed it. Naturally, Congress expected someone else—in this case, as it happened, the Department of International Affairs—to figure out some way of actually doing it. Looking at the three newly appointed commissioners, Ed Piazza grinned. "See if you can instill a proper appreciation of motherhood and apple pie in them, while you're at it. And good luck. I'm going to be busy with other projects for the next few months, so talk to Arnold Bellamy if you run into any problems. This is his baby, now."Bellamy frowned. He always found the bureaucratic acronym N.U.S. rather unfortunate, since the German word Nuss meant "nut" and could be easily extrapolated to "nuts." Knowing how humans react to any opportunity to put down the enemy, he could see a "laugh at the interlopers" campaign coming. "They're all nuts." The Special Commission, for all practical purposes, could be interpreted to mean the Grantville Commission to Force the Franconians to Accept the N.U.S.' Laws Establishing Freedom of Religion. It was one of those things Mike Stearns thought needed Ed's personal attention quite a bit more than the upcoming Rudolstadt Colloquy, if only because the administration already established by the N.U.S. probably wouldn't appreciate being gifted with a special commission. Its very existence at least implied that they wouldn't be doing their jobs right. Or that something, somehow, was lacking."I wish you were going to handle this, not Arnold Bellamy. It's not that he's hard to work with. He's just . . ."". . . reserved," Ed said. "Reserved and still not entirely comfortable working with you.""Stiff," Mike said. "Rigor mortis and all that.""It won't get better unless you work with him. Arnold is perfectly competent. He had a different teaching style than I did, sure, but the students never really griped about it." Ed thought a minute, "It's likely, of course, that not even his wife ever calls him by a pet name. But this is no longer a few thousand people with an administration run by an Emergency Committee that you by and large picked because you knew them and—mostly at least, with a few exceptions like Quentin Underwood—liked them. It's a country of nearly a million people. With an administrative staff comprised mainly of down-timers whom you have never met and may never meet face-to-face. Whom you probably will never meet face-to-face. The commissioners report to Arnold; Arnold reports to you, at least for as long as I'm otherwise occupied. Welcome to the bureaucracy, Mr. President." Arnold Bellamy, looking at the congressional resolution, cleared his throat and commented, "`Civil?' Congress does understand that these were ecclesiastical principalities, don't they? That the rulers of the three biggest ones were two Catholic bishops and a Catholic abbot? That the best one can say about the distinction between `civil' administrations and `ecclesiastical' administration over there is that it's pretty vague?""Well," Mike Stearns answered, "the down-timer delegates do, at least. On the other hand . . .""I know. The Congress has a couple of Catholics among the down-timers. And for Grantville's senator we have Becky, who's Jewish. And if Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel ever showed up to take his seat in the House of Lords, otherwise known as the Senate, we would have a Calvinist. He, however, is chasing around northern Germany in command of an army unit. For all the rest, we've got Lutherans in the N.U.S. Congress. For the simple reason that Lutherans are what we landed in the middle of—the state church of almost every place that's joined the N.U.S. confederation: Badenburg, Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Sommersburg, Sondershausen, Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Altenburg, Saxe-Coburg, Saxe-Eisenach, Saxe-Everyplace Else, you name it. Except for the transients, the refugees who've come in from outside because of the war, they've all been Lutheran for a century, give or take a couple of decades here and there."Mike Stearns sighed. "You know perfectly well what they thought they were voting for. They thought, no matter that it's officially titled a Commission for the Establishment of Religious Freedom, that it's really a Commission to Make Catholic Franconia Safe for Lutherans.""So does Gustavus Adolphus, for that matter, according to the letter he sent down. Our captain-general thinks that it's a grand idea. So does his chancellor, Oxenstierna.""What other frame of reference do they have?" Mike was directing the question more to the air than to Bellamy, but Arnold answered."At least, since they think they know what we're doing, Duke Johann Casimir of Saxe-Coburg has loaned us this Meyfarth guy to help. He wrote the original set of German words to that awful tune that won the N.U.S. national anthem contest. And we're going to need all the help we can get. Trust me on that. Here's a summary of the reports I wrote last fall when I went down to scope out the situation.""Give me a rundown on Meyfarth.""Johann Matthaeus Meyfarth. Matz to his friends. Middle-aged, more or less; in his early forties. He's a Lutheran pastor. That's a priest, if you're Catholic; a minister, if you're a run-of-the-mill American Protestant. And he's a musician, as if seventeenth-century Germany isn't overrun with them. I expect any day now to find out that the garbage collector on our route plays the flute between pickups."Bellamy shook his head. He didn't like thinking about witchcraft persecutions, and found that his mind would take any side direction to avoid focusing on them. Pushing himself back to the topic, he continued. "But Meyfarth also, for years, has been Duke Johann Casimir's point man for squelching witchcraft persecutions. As you've probably noticed, you pretty much have to get south of the ridge of the Thuringian Forest, down toward Suhl and beyond, to find a lot of witchcraft hysteria. Or more precisely, before you find anybody taking a lot of action about witchcraft hysteria. Around here there's been some, sure. People believe that witchcraft exists. Villagers accuse old ladies of souring the milk of nursing mothers; or the herdsman's assistant of maliciously drying up someone's cow. But it hasn't escalated into major investigations, examinations under torture, court cases by the dozen, and smoke going up from the stakes. On the map of Dead German Witches, this area right around Grantville is a fairly nice, white, hole among the black dots. Barely speckled, so to speak.""So Meyfarth is off to Franconia with the commission to work his magic on the second point." Mike raised his eyebrows. "Do I even dare to ask how they managed this?""I believe that they bribed him with the offer of a tenured professorship at the University of Erfurt. If he survives the experience.""What I meant was how they managed to create a `barely speckled' spot on the map amid the polka dots and the black splotches.""Oh," Bellamy answered, "it's simple enough. Johann Casimir is an old man, close to seventy, and not at all well. He's been childless in two marriages, so he has focused on projects rather than accumulating bits and pieces of the Wettin family's properties for his heirs. He has been at this for decades. A long time ago, it occurred to him that these organized antiwitch campaigns don't happen without money: money to pay the investigators, money to hold the hearings, money to pay the torturers, money to pay the executioner. They are not lynchings, by and large. They are perfectly legal judicial proceedings. Exercising their right to administer high justice, to have jurisdiction in capital cases, is one of those perks that the various rulers protect very zealously. That means that persecutions will not happen if there's no money forthcoming to pay all that staff. Therefore, if the ruler refuses to allocate money to pay for witchcraft persecutions—""—We won't have witchcraft persecutions," Mike finished for him. "Or, at least, no more than an occasional random case. Not these systematic witch hunts that lead to chains of accusations and hundreds of burnings. Charming. Beautiful. Elegant, even. I think that I have to admire this technique.""Just keep in mind," Bellamy warned, "that we have a democracy now. One duke can take a notion that he doesn't want to spend money on this, lobby his fellow-rulers, who are also his cousins, and make some progress toward stamping it out, at least in his own region. But if we end up with a majority in Congress who believe that witches should be burned, they may well vote to throw money at the problem. We've been moving awfully fast. If we ever forget that not all our citizens share uptime values, it could turn into something like letting the inmates run the asylum to suit themselves."Mike grunted. "That's always the problem with top-down solutions to social and political problems. The ideal way to handle a problem like this is for some mass movement to do it. From the bottom up. That's why I usually try to have the Committees of Correspondence tackle something like this, whenever it's possible."Bellamy didn't entirely share Mike Stearns' enthusiasm for the revolutionary Committees of Correspondence which had, by now, sprouted up like mushrooms all over Thuringia and were beginning to do the same in and around Magdeburg. But it was all a moot point here, anyway."The CoCs don't amount to much, in Franconia," he pointed out."I know," Mike sighed. "So we'll have to try a top-down approach. Dammit." Common SenseVirginia DeMarce December, 1632: Frankenwinheim, Franconia"Of course no one is happy. Why would anyone be happy?"Old Kaethe sniffed as she poured some very thin beer for her husband, Rudolph Vulpius. The wife of the head of Frankenwinheim's village council doubling in her role as the wife of Frankenwinheim's tavern keeper.Kaethe gave her husband a toothless smile. He had been a good catch forty years before, when they married. Even the fact that his family had at some point Latinized the name from Fuchs to Vulpius indicated that Rudolph had some pretensions to social standing in the village. All things considered, he'd stayed a good catch throughout the four decades that followed the wedding."It will be hard for these `uptimers' to be worse than the Swedes were last winter." He smacked his stein down on the table with a thump.That seemed to be the only consensus the village had reached so far.Constantin Ableidinger, the school teacher, tipped back precariously on his three-legged stool. He was a stocky man, bullnecked, broad shouldered, with straight black hair, brown eyes, and a dark olive complexion. "When do you expect Tobias to get back from Bamberg?""Today, perhaps. He's a reliable boy." The mayor was justifiably proud of his oldest grandson."If we're lucky, he'll bring more information. I sent some money with him, to buy pamphlets and newspapers for sale. We shouldn't just read the free things that the uptimers are handing out."The mayor frowned. "Das Erfolgreiche Dorf," he snorted. "Why do we need foreigners to tell us how to make a village successful? We could make our village successful without their advice. Which, I would like to point out, we never asked for. We know what we need. In fact, before the damned war, we had most of it. A bell in our church tower. Now melted down by the soldiers. A bridge across the creek. Now with its timbers taken for firewood by the soldiers. A stone-lined ditch from the spring on the hill, so we had water here and the boys and girls didn't have to spend half the day going up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Which we can probably have again, once we get the ditch cleared out. They ruined that just for the meanness of it.""At least we have the free pamphlets," Ableidinger pointed out. "When the Swedes burned the schoolhouse last winter, they burned most of the books we had with it. The ones that weren't in my cottage, anyway. So I'm using these `hand-outs' for the children to read. Some of them are pretty good. The one they call Die Wochentliche Bauernzeitung is the best, I think. Apparently these uptimers have an organization called a `grange' that's been publishing this weekly newspaper for farmers for almost a year up in Thuringia. We've only gotten a few issues, so far. Mostly old ones. It has articles on farming, of course, but also woodcuts and jokes. Stories for fathers to read to their families in the evenings."The village pastor frowned. "Very few of them are edifying." Otto Schaeffer didn't find many things to be edifying, once the members of his flock had completed their perusal of Luther's Shorter Catechism. Which, he thought, they should peruse much more regularly than most of them did.Ableidinger shook his head. "They aren't biblical or classical. But some of them are really funny. Especially the woodcuts, the `cartoons.' One of the issues introduced `Peter Baufaellig.' He makes me think that maybe we'll be able to understand these uptimers after all. The introduction said that there were woodcuts about him in a newspaper about farming uptime. The head of this `grange' read about this `Peter Tumbledown' when he was a child. Every village has a man like that now. I guess every village still had one then. The one who doesn't oil his harness, who lets his hinges rust, who doesn't fix the leak before something inside is ruined.""Materialistic," the pastor proclaimed."Fixing things that need fixing fits into `render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's," Ableidinger said stubbornly.Kaethe frowned. She, along with most of the women, thought the village was lucky to have Ableidinger as its teacher, even if he wasn't local. His family had been Lutheran refugees out of Austria who had settled up around Coburg. He wasn't an easy man, but he kept the children disciplined and, most of the time, interested. That wasn't easy. Energetic and vigorous, at least when the melancholy didn't seize him. Moody, when it did. In that case, there wasn't much to be done except wait it out. And feed the boy, of course, if his father forgot to. Matthias was a good boy, well worth a few bowls of soup or porridge.Kaethe knew that Pastor Schaeffer wasn't as pleased as Frankenwinheim's mothers and grandmothers were. She also knew one main reason why. It wasn't just that the teacher—who was, of course, also the organist back before the soldiers had smashed the organ, as well as the sexton and the clerk for the village council, since no one could reasonably expect a man to survive on what a village schoolteacher earned, much less feed a family—had lived in the village for years before the new pastor came and knew the people better. It was that he had been to the university at Jena, just like the pastor. He had finished the arts curriculum and started to study law before he was thrown out for getting a baker's daughter pregnant and marrying her.She shook her head. Rudolph kept saying mildly that this was the young pastor's first job and he was still full of himself and all of his book-learning. Rudolph argued that Pastor Schaeffer would season all right if they just put up with him for a while.She sort of doubted it. Ableidinger, who was fifteen years older than his new supervisor, was sure that he knew just as much and probably more. He didn't hesitate to say so in public, either. She moved over to the window, pulling back one of the wooden shutters that kept out the winter air, hoping to find a distraction in what was left of the winter daylight that would head off another dispute between God's representatives on earth—or, at least, between God's representatives in Frankenwinheim.It didn't help that Pastor Schaeffer so strongly disapproved of Ableidinger's marriage. The pastor was still unmarried. He had heard all about the scandal when he was studying in Jena—a Professor Lenz had told him all about it. He still disapproved strongly, even though the poor woman had been dead for five years now.Kaethe shook her head. Maybe the pastor had skipped over, "Let the dead bury their dead."Today, she was lucky. "Tobias is coming," she said. "And it looks like his rucksack is full." "It's a new one." Vulpius picked up Die Moderne Landwirtschaft, which Tobias had shaken out onto the table in front of his grandfather. "Modern Agriculture, no less. Our new governors must be setting out to make every printing press in Bamberg profitable."Ableidinger moved over to stand at the shutter Kaethe had opened, sorting through a package of pamphlets that he had ordered from Würzburg. That was where the new governors of Franconia had set up the center of their administration, so he thought that the most important publications were likely to be printed there—not in Bamberg, which was just a regional center, if he understood the newspaper right.The stack wasn't as big as he would have liked it to be. It was going to be another grim winter. If food was scarce and prices went up, he had to keep some kind of a reserve if he was going to feed his son and himself. He could afford a few short items and broadsides, but he could not risk buying expensive books. Not this year, no matter how glum it made him. Winter was a glum time in the best of years, with the days so short. Glum. Grim. The only comfort was having something to read.So the small size of the package that Tobias had been able to buy was discouraging. He picked up the first. Der Gesunde Menschenverstand. Below, the subtitle read, Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" Translated into German, with an Explanation of Unfamiliar Terms.He frowned. The first unfamiliar term was "common sense." He had never heard of something called gesunder Menschenverstand. "Healthy human understanding?" He thumbed through the foreword. The translator had considered using schlichte Vernunft as an alternative translation before settling on the one he chose."Simple reason?"He had just begun to lose himself in reading the pamphlet when Rudolph Vulpius started to laugh. "Here, Pastor Schaeffer. You being named a shepherd, here's one for you." Vulpius tossed an issue of Die Wochentliche Bauernzeitung, one that hadn't previously reached Frankenwinheim, across the rough boards of the table.Schaeffer read the page, the expression on his face becoming grimmer with each line.Stuffing Common Sense into his belt, Ableidinger came back to the table, looking over the pastor's shoulder. It was the entertainment page. At the top, large type proclaimed, The Latest from Grantville. Just below, on the left, was a woodcut of a scruffy but very well-endowed ram. The title was Schade, Brillo! Schade! "Shame on you, Brillo! Shame!""What's a Brillo?" Old Kaethe asked. She was looking over the pastor's other shoulder with no more deference to his status than Ableidinger showed."Maybe it explains it somewhere in the story," Vulpius said.Pastor Schaeffer was turning red and starting to sputter."For the sake of your health," Ableidinger said, reaching over and taking the newspaper. "It's a fable, like Aesop. That's classical enough." He started to read it out loud for everyone in the tavern. His booming voice, trained in rhetoric and debate, caught the attention of even the people who didn't pay much attention to the politics of the village or the region. "The English title of the story was Bad, Ba-a-a-ad, Brillo!"Everyone knew animal fables. Nobody had trouble figuring out that Brillo, whatever a Brillo might be, stood for the sturdy German farmer. Nor that the merino ram stood for the rulers who made their lives difficult.Ableidinger was no more than half way through when Pastor Schaeffer got up and left the tavern.None of the rest of the audience paid any attention to his disapproval. Frankenwinheim provided him with an unruly flock.Kaethe pulled the shutter closed and brought in an oil lamp. "Read it again," she ordered. "Maybe there's something to be happy about, after all."Rudolph blinked up at her. "What?""The uptimers printed it, didn't they? The plain old ordinary ram was clever enough to outwit the highly bred one. This wasn't smuggled in. Our new rulers—they printed a fable in which this Brillo triumphed."Ableidinger grinned. "Not edifying, of course. To be properly edifying, I'm sure Pastor Schaeffer would insist that Brillo should have come to a proper insight that God the Father had established the merino ram as the representative of His secular sword on earth and deferred to the gentleram, giving him proper precedence.""Teacher." Old Kaethe rapped him on the top of the head. "That's not respectful."Ableidinger nodded. "I know." His voice rumbled as he started reading through the fable again. He had to read Schade, Brillo! Schade! a half-dozen times. Not that the rest of the villagers couldn't read, but they only had one copy of the story. In any case, most people would rather hear something read out loud, with feeling and emphasis in the reader's voice. By the time they got out of the tavern, it was full dark. Old Kaethe had given them a crock of hot broth to dunk their bread. Matthias was sleeping on his cot. The comfort in his stomach had put him right to sleep.The oil in the lamp wouldn't last much longer.Ableidinger hadn't been that surprised by the fable. In other issues of the weekly newspaper for farmers, the uptimers had published paragraphs of political philosophy. Sayings. Maxims. He had copied out some of them, from John Locke, from Benjamin Franklin, from Thomas Jefferson.But those authors were Englishmen, and they had written then, not now. If he understood properly what this Grantville city signified, they had written in a "then" that now would never happen. In a future that never would be.The Bible provided comfort for all tribulations. "With God, all things are possible."Thus, a city from the future, too, was possible.Not that Pastor Schaeffer would be likely to see it that way.Ableidinger had been a little surprised by the fable. The other authors had written "then." Not to mention "there." Brillo was, most certainly, here and now. An ordinary German ram.Ableidinger opened Common Sense. He would make the most of this evening's ration of oil. He didn't have much time for reading in the daylight in winter. That was when most of his pupils spent most of their days at school, so he had to teach the lessons.That was his job. Teaching. Not thinking about political philosophy. Then and now. There and here. Thomas Paine. "The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind." How local circumstances could give rise to universal principles. "The laying a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; . . ."Ableidinger frowned to himself. Looking up, he frowned at his pupils, directing the older ones back to doing simple addition on their slates.Did the uptimers who would be administering Franconia agree with Paine?If so, why were they working for the king of Sweden?If not, why had they published this pamphlet in German?He continued reading, fascinated by the distinction that Paine made between society and government, the first produced by men's wants and promoting their happiness; the second produced by men's wickedness and restraining their vices. Society was a blessing; government a necessary evil. "The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher."Hey, this was a good one! ". . . The palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise." For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others. Ableidinger was very happy to discover that the new administration—or, at least, the men who had founded the country from which the new administrators came—had a clear and distinct picture in their minds of the way a village ought to work. Whether or not it did, of course, was another question.Looking up at the children, he told them to stop working and listen while he read to them.None of them objected.He read through Paine's description of a small number of persons, settling a new land and, in a condition of "natural liberty," establishing a society by cooperating with one another."A thousand motives will excite them thereto . . ."He assigned the older children the task of thinking of just ten of those motives for establishing a society in the wilderness. Each of them should talk with his or her parents and bring the list to school the next day. They would combine all the lists and then compare them to the reasons that Thomas Paine gave for this action.They did combine the lists. Then he had each child copy Paine's reasons and take them home to their parents.The pastor, when he heard about this assignment, was not pleased. He said so to the mayor."Surely," Old Kaethe asked, "you would not deny that God's children should endeavor to assist one another? Charity is a virtue.""When you put it that way . . ." Schaeffer turned and went back to his house.At the school, Ableidinger was still proceeding through Common Sense. Once Paine's hypothetical emigrants had established a society, because they began to "relax in their duty and attachment to each other," they reached a point at which "this remissness will point out the necessity of establishing some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue."Ah. How remarkable! A lot of what Paine wrote was specific to the circumstances of England and England's handling of its colonies in America. That was specific to time and place. Ableidinger skipped over this in school. It wasn't something the children really need

d to learn, and he did have to find time for the regular lessons. England was far away and every educated man in the Germanies knew that the place was terribly backwards. Besides, if Thomas Paine had believed that the "English constitution" was complex, one could only assume that he had never made a study of the Holy Roman Empire.Some things, though, were worth emphasizing. Paine even knew of the ancient custom of the villages in many parts of the Germanies according to which the council met under a tree.* * *Some convenient tree will afford them a State House, under the branches of which the whole Colony may assemble to deliberate on public matters. It is more than probable that their first laws will have the title only of Regulations and be enforced by no other penalty than public disesteem. In this first parliament every man by natural right will have a seat. Paine didn't seem to realize that it ought to be a linden tree. But then, there was a limit to what one could expect of foreigners. Perhaps there were no lindens in England or this far-away America.As Ableidinger taught Paine to his students, he started sending out circular letters to the teachers in other villages in the vicinity urging them to obtain their own copies of the pamphlet and helpfully enclosing the lesson plans he was developing for teaching it.The most complicated one dealt with the increase in size of the imaginary colony, which required that village-style government be supplemented by a system of elected representatives. Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. Freedom and security. And however our eyes may be dazzled with show, or our ears deceived by sound; however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of nature and reason will say, 'tis right. The "simple voice of nature and reason."Der gesunde Menschenverstand. Common Sense.Even in those sections specific to England, there were some good diagnoses of the general problems and occasional sentences from which general principles could be derived.Ableidinger found Paine's analysis of scriptural principles to be not only excellent, but also quite in keeping with many of the assertions made at the time of the Peasant War in 1525—the one in which the farmers' hope for liberty had been so betrayed by the leaders of the new Reformation. He looked at the piece of paper on the table in front of him. Yes, Lutheran though he was himself, he would write it. In this matter, Luther had betrayed the Germans' hopes for greater liberty. Government by kings was first introduced into the world by the Heathens, from whom the children of Israel copied the custom. It was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry. The Heathens paid divine honours to their deceased kings, and the Christian World hath improved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones. How impious is the title of sacred Majesty applied to a worm, who in the midst of his splendor is crumbling into dust! Ableidinger laughed out loud. After what Franconia had suffered from the invasion of the Swede and his allies, he could only agree with Paine's statement that, "Absolute governments, (tho' the disgrace of human nature) have this advantage with them, they are simple; if the people suffer, they know the head from which their suffering springs; know likewise the remedy; and are not bewildered by a variety of causes and cures."