ides now with this one, now the other, and nobody apparently ever
thinking of the poor peasantry.

The spirit of the brutal soldiery grew ever more atrocious. Their
captives were tortured to death for punishment or for ransom, or, it is
to be feared, for the mere amusement of the bestial captors. The open
country became everywhere a wilderness. The soldiers themselves began
starving in the dismal desert.

The Emperor, Ferdinand II, the cause of all this destruction, died in
1637, and was succeeded by his son, Ferdinand III (1637-1657). The war
still continued, though in a feeble, listless way, with no decisive
victories on either side, until the peace of Westphalia, in 1648. This
peace placed Protestants and Catholics on an equal footing of toleration
throughout the empire. It gave Sweden what territory she wanted in the
north, and France what she asked toward the Rhine. Switzerland and
Holland were acknowledged as independent lands. The importance of the
smaller princes was increased, they, too, becoming practically
independent, and the power of the emperors was all but destroyed. From
this time the importance of the Hapsburgs rested solely on their
personal possessions in Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia. The title of
emperor remained little better than a name.

Indeed, Germany itself had become scarcely more than a name. During
those terrible thirty years the population of the land is said to have
dwindled from fifteen millions to less than five millions. In the
Palatinate less than fifty thousand people remained, where there had
been five hundred thousand. Whole districts everywhere lay utterly
waste, wild, and uninhabited. Men killed themselves to escape
starvation, or slew their brothers for a fragment of bread. A full
description of the horrors of that awful time will never be written;
much has been mercifully obliterated. The material progress of Germany,
its students say, was retarded by two centuries' growth. To this day the
land has not fully recovered from the exhaustion of that awful war.

FOOTNOTES:

[32] From _The Story of the Greatest Nations_, by permission
of F. R. Niglutsch.

FIRST AMERICAN LEGISLATURE

A.D. 1619

CHARLES CAMPBELL

As a distinctly American event the beginning of formal
legislation in this country has special interest, no less for
the general reader than for students of legal history. None of
the early institutions of the fathers is more important tha