of printing; when, in spite of fighting on
the highways and bloody quarrels within the cities, commerce and trade
began to flourish; when citizens and peasants acquired the habits of
regular soldiers; when the German merchant established his supremacy on
the northern seas, while the Italian navigator pressed on through the
mists of boundless oceans, to unknown regions of the earth; finally, it
was the time in which the Alpine mules bore, together with the spices
of the East and the papal bulls, the manuscripts of a foreign nation,
by means of which a new enlightenment was spread over Germany,--the
early dawn of modern life.

With the sixteenth century began the greatest spiritual movement that
ever roused a nation. This century has for ever impressed its seal on
the spirit and temper of the German people. A wonderful time, in which
a great nation anxiously yearning after its God, sought peace for the
burdened soul, and a moral and mental aim for a life hitherto so poor
and joyless.

This effort of the popular mind to found a new collective life by a
deep apprehension of the eternal, produced a political development in
Germany which is strikingly distinct from that of other nations. The
whole powers of the nation were so engrossed in this passionate
struggle, that it sank into a state of extreme exhaustion: the
political concentration of Germany was delayed for centuries; most
fearful civil wars were followed by a deathlike lassitude; German was
divided from German, and a deep chasm was formed between the new and
the middle ages. The result was, that a large portion of the German
people, who might carry back their history in uninterrupted continuity
up to the struggles of Arius and Arminus, now regard the time of the
Hohenstaufen, and even the imperial government of the first Maximilian,
as a dark tradition; for their state polity, their rights, and their
municipal laws are hardly as old as those of the free states of North
America. The oldest of the proud nations that arose from the ruins of
the Roman empire, is now in many respects the youngest member of the
European family. But whatever may have been the influence of the
sixteenth century on the political formation of the fatherland, every
German should look back to it with respect, for we owe to it all which
now is our hope and pride; our power of self-sacrifice, our morality
and freedom of mind, an irresistible impulse for truth, our art, and
our unrivalled system