paint the result of this fearful struggle. "Thirty
years of war! The slaughters of Rome's worst emperors, the persecution
of the Christians under Nero and Diocletian, the invasions of the Huns
and Magyars, the long struggle of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, left no
such desolation behind them. At the beginning of the century, the
population of the German Empire was about 30,000,000; when the Peace of
Westphalia was declared, it was scarcely more than 12,000,000! Electoral
Saxony, alone, lost 900,000 lives in two years.... The city of Berlin
contained but 300 citizens, the whole of the Palatinate of the Rhine but
200 farmers. In Hesse-Cassel, 17 cities, 47 castles, and 300 villages
were entirely destroyed by fire; thousands of villages, in all parts of
the country, had but four or five families left out of hundreds, and
landed property sank to about one twentieth of its former value.... The
horses, cattle, and sheep were exterminated in many districts, the
supplies of grain were at an end, even for sowing, and large cultivated
tracts had relapsed into a wilderness. Even orchards and vineyards had
been wantonly destroyed wherever armies had passed. So terrible was the
ravage that, in a great many localities, the same amount of population,
cattle, acres of cultivated land, and general prosperity was not
restored until the year 1848, two centuries afterward!

"This statement of the losses of Germany, however, was but a small part
of the suffering endured.... During the last ten or twelve years of the
war, both Protestants and Catholics vied with each other in deeds of
barbarity; the soldiers were nothing but highway robbers, who maimed and
tortured the country people to make them give up their last remaining
property.... In the year 1637, when Ferdinand II. died, the want was so
great that men devoured each other, and even hunted down human beings
like deer or hares, in order to feed upon them.

"In character, in intelligence, and in morality, the German people were
set back two hundred years. All branches of industry had declined,
commerce had almost entirely ceased, literature and the arts were
suppressed, and except the astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and
Kepler, there was no contribution to human knowledge. Even the modern
High German language, which Luther had made the classic tongue of the
land, seemed to be on the point of perishing. Spaniards and Italians on
the Catholic, Swedes and French on the Protestant side