emed to
find a stimulus in the very exhaustions of war. The protesting ideas for
which they fought drew fresh tenacity from the soil, wet with blood and
tears, into which generous passion and resolution sank with every death.
Here it is plain that a milder conflict, carried on by intrigue and
diplomatic forms alone, for peaceable separation from the Catholic
interest, would not have so quickened the intelligence which afterwards
nourished so many English exiles and helped to freight the Mayflower.
And we see the German mind first beginning to blossom with a language
and a manifold literature during and after the Seven Years' War, which
developed a powerful Protestant State and a native German feeling.
Frederic's Gallic predilections did not infect the country which his
arms had rendered forever anti-Gallic and anti-Austrian. The popular
enthusiasm for himself, which his splendid victories mainly created, was
the first instinctive form of the coming German sense of independence.
The nation's fairest period coincided with the French Revolution and
the aggressions of the Empire. "Hermann and Dorothea" felt the people's
pulse, which soon beat so high at Jena and Leipsic with rage and hope.
The hope departed with the Peace of 1815, and pamphleteering, pragmatic
writing, theological investigation, historical research, followed the
period of creative genius, whose flowers did not wither while the fields
ran red.

A war must be the last resort of truly noble and popular ideas, if it
would do more than stimulate the intelligence of a few men, who write
best with draughts of glory and success. It must be the long-repressed
understanding of a nation suffused with strong primitive emotions,
that flies to arms to secure the precious privilege of owning and
entertaining its knowledge and its national advantages. And in
proportion as any war has ever been leavened with the fine excitement of
religion or humanity, however imperfectly, and though tyrannized over
by political selfishness, we can see that the honest feeling has done
something to obliterate the traces of violence, to offer the comfort of
worth in the cause to wounded lips.

When the people themselves take to fighting, not for dynastic objects,
to secure the succession of an Infant to the throne, to fix a Pope in
his chair, or to horse a runaway monarch around their necks, not to
extort some commercial advantage, or to resist a tampering with the
traditional balance of po