be crushed, and all the
ideas suppressed, which had grown up in the German soil for one hundred
and forty years, or the pretensions of the Imperial House must be
certainly and fundamentally overcome: The last was impossible to the
Germans without the help of Sweden. Thus on a retrospect of those
years, every one will be well disposed to Sweden, who does not consider
it a mere accident that well-known men of later times, like Lessing,
Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Humboldt did not blossom out
of the country in which hundreds of thousands were driven from Church
and school, by the Jesuits of Ferdinand II. But at that period the
patriot undoubtedly felt the weakness of the Empire more than all the
fearful misery of the people. And great ground there was for anxiety
about the future. From this point of view this brochure is to us the
first expression of that feeling which still, in the present day,
unites hundreds of thousands of Germans. That love of Fatherland took
root in the oppressed souls of our ancestors during the Thirty years'
war, which has not yet attained to political life by a unity of
constitutions. Such a feeling indeed only existed then in the minds of
the noblest. But we must honour those who, in a century poor in hope,
left in their teaching and writings, as an inheritance to their
descendants, the idea of a German Empire.

After Banner's devastating expedition all was quiet in Germany. Almost
all the news and State records which the war had left, flowed from the
press. In the last years thousands of printed sheets were filled with
the negotiations for peace. Finally the peace was announced to the poor
people in large placards.

CHAPTER V.

THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR.--THE CITIES.

When the war broke out, the cities were the armed guardians of German
trade, which was carried on with wealth and bustle, in narrow streets
between high houses. Almost every city, with the exception of the
smallest market towns, was shut out from the open country by walls,
gates, and moats. The approaches were narrow and easy to defend; there
were often double walls, and in many cases the old towers still
overtopped the battlements and gates. Many of the more important of
these middle-age fortifications had been strengthened in the course of
the century, the bastions of stone and brick-work, as well as strong
single towers, were mounted with heavy artillery; a