gns." "Disease, famine, and want of discipline swept
away whole armies before they had seen an enemy." Soldiers deserted the
ranks, and became roving banditti. Law and justice entirely vanished
from the land. Germany, it is asserted by Mitchell, lost probably twelve
millions of people. Before the war, the population was sixteen millions;
at the close of the war, it had dwindled to four millions. The city of
Augsburg at one time had eighty thousand inhabitants; at the close of
the war, it had only eighteen thousand. "No less than thirty thousand
villages and hamlets were destroyed. Peaceful peasants were hunted for
mere sport, like the beasts of the forest. Citizens were nailed up and
fired at like targets. Women were collected into bands, driven like
slaves into camp, and exposed to indignities worse than death. The
fields were allowed to run waste, and forests sprung up and covered
entire districts which before the war had been under full cultivation."
Amid these scenes of misery and ruin, vices were more marked than
calamities. They were carried to the utmost pitch of vulgarity. Both
Austrian and Swedish generals were often so much intoxicated, for days
together, as to be incapable of service. Never was a war attended by so
many horrors. Never was crime more general and disgusting. So terrible
were the desolations, that it took Germany one hundred years to recover
from her losses. It never recovered the morality and religion which
existed in the time of Luther. That war retarded civilization in all the
countries where it raged. It was a moral and physical conflagration.

But there is a God in this world, and the evils were overruled. It is
certain that Protestantism was rescued from extermination on the
continent of Europe. It is clear also that a barrier was erected against
the aggressions of Austria. The Catholic and the Protestant religions
were left unmolested in the countries where they prevailed, and all
religious sects were tolerated. Religious toleration, since the Thirty
Years' War, has been the boast and glory of Germany.

We should feel a sickening melancholy if something for the ultimate good
of the world were not to come from such disasters as filled Germany with
grief and indignation for a whole generation; for the immediate effects
of the Thirty Years' War were more disastrous than those of any war I
have read of in the history of Europe since the fall of the Roman
Empire. In the civil wars of France an