butt end of a musket, and
feared lest his son should grow too tall, and come into the horrible
position of having to shoulder a weapon in rank and file.

This change was effected by the new polity of the princes.

CHAPTER IV.

STATE POLICY AND THE INDIVIDUAL.
(1600-1700.)

The last stage of the process of dissolution which the holy Roman
empire passed through occupies the hundred and fifty years from
Oxenstern to Napoleon. The mortal disease began in 1520, when Charles
V., the Burgundian Hapsburger, was crowned Emperor of Germany; the
death struggle itself did not begin till the election of Ferdinand II.,
the Jesuit protector, in 1620. The peal of bells that celebrated the
Westphalian peace was a death-knell; what followed was the last slow
destruction of an expiring organism. But it was also the beginning of a
new organic formation. The rise of the Prussian state coincides
precisely with the end of the Thirty Years' War.

Whether joy or sorrow ought to predominate in the consideration of such
a period depends not only on the political point of view, but on the
culture and character of those who form a judgment on it. To those who
love to depict with poetic warmth the glories of a German empire, such
as perhaps might have been, the advent and character of a time so poor
in great men and in national pride can only be repugnant; whoever is in
the unfortunate position of considering the interests of the
Hapsburgers or those of the Order of Jesus as essentially German, will
form an imaginary picture of the past, which will be as far removed
from the reality, as the relique worship of the ancient church is from
the free man's worship of God. But whoever investigates temperately and
sensibly the connection of events, should be careful, in writing the
history of this period, not to forget, in the hatefulness of
appearances, to do justice to what was legitimate in the reality, and
equally so, not for the sake of what, is good, to throw a veil over
that which is odious. It is not purely accidental that it is only easy
to one who is both a Protestant and a Prussian, to regard with
conscious pride and a cheerful heart the historical development of the
last two centuries.

Immediately after the peace of Muenster and Osnabruck, two views of
German politics confronted one another, the one which, in spite of the
diminution of the Hapsburg i