ich attained to great importance, like that of
peruke-maker, were of doubtful value to the national industry.

Equally great was the change which took place after the Thirty Years'
War in the social life of the citizens, in their intercourse with each
other and with strangers. In a former volume it was shown to what an
extent individuals withdrew into their families. It is worth the
trouble of examining more nearly what they lost by this. First, that
feeling of self-dependence which the most diffident man acquires by
frequent intercourse with strangers, the capability of co-operating
with others in a larger sphere, of representing a conviction, acting in
a manly way, and not submitting to any affront or unjust treatment, but
at the same time yielding up pride and pretensions to the common weal;
added to this the skill to organise themselves in new positions and
more extended society, and to accommodate themselves to these altered
circumstances. Such a tone of mind, the groundwork of all man's
political capacity, was to be found in abundance at an earlier period.
The power of the Empire and of the princes having become very weak, the
aptitude of individuals to act in masses was strongly developed, but
after the war the laws of the newly-formed states pressed with such an
iron hand, that all the art and practice of self-government was lost.

This change shall be here shown, in a single phase of citizen life--the
great prize shooting festivals. They are more especially adapted to
give a picture in detail of the stately and splendid public life of the
German citizen in olden times, and to show that we are only now
beginning--though certainly with higher aims--again to attain to what
our ancestors had already found.

It has been a German custom, older than Christianity, to celebrate the
awakening life of nature in May. This has always been a martial feast,
in which the fundamental idea of the old heathen faith, the victory of
the awakening divinities of nature over the demons of winter, was
dramatically represented. In the rising cities it was the warlike youth
of the freeborn citizens who lead the May sports, and in the
Hohenstaufen time these sports assumed the form of fashionable knightly
festivals. Thus in the year 1279, at Magdeburg, on the borders of the
Rhine, where Saxon blood had formed one of the strongest fortresses of
German life against the Sclavonian, the Whitsuntide feast was
celebrated quite in knightly sty