pan were in Protestant hands. In 1621 a West Indian Company
was founded which conquered Brazil and in North America built a fortress
called Nieuw Amsterdam at the mouth of the river which Henry Hudson had
discovered in the year 1609

These new colonies enriched both England and the Dutch Republic to such
an extent that they could hire foreign soldiers to do their fighting on
land while they devoted themselves to commerce and trade. To them the
Protestant revolt meant independence and prosperity. But in many other
parts of Europe it meant a succession of horrors compared to which the
last war was a mild excursion of kindly Sunday-school boys.

The Thirty Years War which broke out in the year 1618 and which ended
with the famous treaty of Westphalia in 1648 was the perfectly natural
result of a century of ever increasing religious hatred. It was, as
I have said, a terrible war. Everybody fought everybody else and the
struggle ended only when all parties had been thoroughly exhausted and
could fight no longer.

In less than a generation it turned many parts of central Europe into a
wilderness, where the hungry peasants fought for the carcass of a dead
horse with the even hungrier wolf. Five-sixths of all the German towns
and villages were destroyed. The Palatinate, in western Germany, was
plundered twenty-eight times. And a population of eighteen million
people was reduced to four million.

The hostilities began almost as soon as Ferdinand II of the House of
Habsburg had been elected Emperor. He was the product of a most careful
Jesuit training and was a most obedient and devout son of the Church.
The vow which he had made as a young man, that he would eradicate all
sects and all heresies from his domains, Ferdinand kept to the best
of his ability. Two days before his election, his chief opponent,
Frederick, the Protestant Elector of the Palatinate and a son-in-law of
James I of England, had been made King of Bohemia, in direct violation
of Ferdinand's wishes.

At once the Habsburg armies marched into Bohemia. The young king looked
in vain for assistance against this formidable enemy. The Dutch Republic
was willing to help, but, engaged in a desperate war of its own with
the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs, it could do little. The Stuarts in
England were more interested in strengthening their own absolute power
at home than spending money and men upon a forlorn adventure in far away
Bohemia. After a struggle of a few