ent; nay, before the Thirty Years' War, much
progress was apparent. But it was their peculiar characteristic that,
with this comprehension of their dangerous situation, of the
helplessness of the Empire, and of its miserable, dislocated state, the
people calmly and quietly recognised it with a shake of the head; even
their literary teachers were rarely roused to manly indignation, still
less to determined will, nor even to form fruitless projects. Thus, the
nation in the seventeenth century might be compared to a hopeless
invalid, who, free from the excitement of fever, soberly, calmly, and
sensibly contemplates his own condition. We know, indeed, that it is
our own century which has cured this morbid state of the German people;
but we also perceive the cause of the singular, cold, and gloomy
objectiveness which became so peculiar to our nation, and of which
traces are yet to be discovered in many individuals. It is the disease
of a rightly-gifted, genial nature, whose volition has been crushed by
the horrors of war and the struggles of fate, and whose warm heart has
been benumbed. A clear, circumspect, just spirit remains to the German;
noble political enthusiasm is lost to him. He no longer finds pleasure
and honour in being the citizen of a great State; he has no nation that
he loves, no State that he honours; he is an individual among
individuals; he has well-wishers and detractors, good friends and bad
enemies, scarcely any fellow-citizens as yet, scarcely yet any
countrymen.

As characteristic of such a frame of mind, a flying-sheet will here be
given, which, in the allegorical style of the seventeenth century,
makes bitter observations on the new State policy. Even during the
great war, Bogislaw Philipp Chemnitz, one of the most zealous and
talented adherents of the Swedish party, made a prodigious sensation by
a book, in which he complains of the Imperial house as the principal
cause of the misery of Germany, and finds the only salvation of the
country in the independence and complete power of the German princes.
From the title of the book,[77] "_Staatsraison_," this expression
became the usual term for denoting the new system of government which,
after the peace, began to prevail in the German territories. Since
that, this _Staatsraison_ was through half a century condemned in
numerous moral treatises from the popular press; it was represented as
double and triple headed, and in books, pictures, and satirical v