arcely amount
to a probable valuation of the loss which Germany suffered in men,
beasts of burden, and productive power. The following inferences only
attempt to express the views of an individual, which a few examples
will support.

The condition of the provinces of Thuringia and Franconia is not ill
adapted for a comparison of the past with the present; neither of them
were more afflicted by the visitation of war than other countries; the
state of cultivation of both provinces, up to the present time, answers
pretty accurately to the general average of German industry and
agriculture: neither of them are on the whole rich: both were hilly
countries, without large rivers, or any considerable coal strata, with
low lands, of which only certain tracts were distinguished by especial
fertility, and were up to modern times devoted to agriculture, garden
culture, and small mining industry. Thus this portion of Germany had
known no powerful stream of human enterprise or capital, nor, on the
other hand, was it the theatre of the destructive wars of Louis XIV.'s
time, and the rulers, especially the grandson of Frederic the Wise,
were even in the worst times tolerably sparing of the national
strength.

There have been preserved to us from these districts, amongst other
things, accurate statistical notices of twenty communities, which once
were in the Hennebergen domain; but now, with the exception of one that
is Bavarian, belong to Saxe Meiningen. It is nowhere mentioned, and
from their condition need not be concluded, that the devastation in
them had been greater than in other portions of the province. The
government in 1649 ordered an accurate report to be given of the number
of inhabited houses, barns, and head of cattle that existed when the
worst sufferings of the war began in 1634. According to the reports
delivered by the magistrates of the places, there had perished in
the twenty communities more than eighty-two per cent, of families,
eighty-five per cent, of horses, more than eighty-three of goats, and
eighty-two of cows, and more than sixty-three per cent. of houses. The
remaining houses were described as in many places damaged and in ruins,
the still surviving horses as lame and blind, and the fields and
meadows as devastated and much overgrown with underwood; but the sheep
were everywhere altogether destroyed.[40]

It is a bloody and terrible tale which these numbers tell us. More than
four fifths of the populatio