be the center of European traffic and
commerce. Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, took successively the
leadership, the latter keeping it until our own days. German industry
and German commerce began to decline. At the same time, the religious
Reformation had destroyed the political unity of the nation. The
Reformation became the cloak under which the German principalities
sought to emancipate themselves from the Imperial power. In their turn,
the Princes brought the power of the nobility under their own control,
and, in order to reach this end all the more easily, favored the cities,
not a few of which, in sight of the ever more troubled times, placed
themselves, of their own free will, under the rule of the Princes. The
final effect was that the bourgeois or capitalist class, alarmed at the
financial decline of its trade, raised ever higher barriers to protect
itself against unpleasant competition. The ossification of conditions
gained ground; and with it the impoverishment of the masses.

Later, the Reformation had for a consequence the calling forth of the
religious wars and persecutions--always, of course, as cloaks for the
political and economic purposes of the Princes--that, with short
interruptions, raged throughout Germany for over a century, and ended
with the country's complete exhaustion, at the close of the Thirty
Years' War in 1648. Germany had become an immense field of corpses and
ruins; whole territories and provinces lay waste; hundreds of cities,
thousands of villages had been partially or wholly burnt down; many of
them have since disappeared forever from the face of the earth. In other
places the population had sunk to a third, a fourth, a fifth, even to an
eighth and tenth part. Such was the case, for instance, with cities like
Neurenberg, and with the whole of Franconia. And now, at the hour of
extreme need, and with the end in view of providing the depopulated
cities and villages as quickly as possible with an increased number of
people, the drastic measure was resorted to of "raising the law," and
_allowing a man two wives_. The wars had carried off the men; of women
there was an excess. On February 14, 1650, the Congress of Franconia,
held in Nuerenberg, adopted the resolution that "men under sixty years
of age shall not be admitted to the monasteries;" furthermore, it
ordered "the priests and curates, if not ordained, and the canons of
religious establishments, shall marry;" "moreover every m