r before in history. He spent
freely and largely of his own private means to help his subjects, yet an
American, in his "History of the Trade in Soldiers by German Princes,"
tries to show that the Elector of Hesse enriched himself by many millions
out of the treasury. The German historian Schlosser, with equal
indifference to the truth, charges the Elector with putting in his own
pocket the money earned with blood and wounds and life by the brave
Hessians in the Seven Years' War, and that given as compensation for the
injury done his country and its capital, making no return to the poor
sufferers, and that the American war produced still worse
results,--neither the English pay nor the money for wounds received by the
soldiers enriched anybody but the Prince. This charge is utterly baseless.
The fact is that compensation for wounds was first introduced in the wars
of Napoleon, and the money paid for dead and wounded soldiers under all
the treaties of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was given as
compensation for the bounty lost by the enlisted men, and was used for the
military hospitals, and never intended for the soldiers. The Elector,
whose statue still stands in Cassel, was worthy of his great ancestors,
and kept alive the grateful memory of his and their subjects. They have
always been free men, without any trace of bad government. Their conduct
during the French Revolution showed their patriotism.

After this "Defence" was first published, it was submitted to Mr.
Frederich Kapp, the Prussian American, who had attacked the Elector of
Hesse in his books, and his charges were referred to the leading authority
on Hessian history, who fully refuted them. To further substantiate the
character of the Elector, reference is made to the funeral sermon of the
Free Masons' Lodge of Cassel on the death of the noble prince. Kapp's
books, especially his "Soldaten-Handel" [Dealing in Soldiers], are full of
sneers at him and at his son, and although Kapp disproves and discredits
the "Urias"[1] letter, it is on technical and not moral grounds that he
relieves the Elector of the disgraceful charge of dealing in the blood and
bones of his subjects out of avarice. He does not contradict Mirabeau's
appeal to the Hessians, full as it is of party hostility. Kapp repeats
the false charge that the Elector made money by false lists, so as to draw
pay for more soldiers than were really in service, overlooking the fact
that the annual a