"Be of good comfort: there are many remaining who wish you well from their heart, who pray for you, and show their devotion to you in every possible way. A country where such people are to be found cannot be accused of ingratitude; and that there are yet many thousand such people, even your enemies know right well. But that selfishness, secret envy, hidden counsels, and clandestine negotiations are stirred up against you, must not be ascribed to the whole of this praiseworthy German nation, but only to the causes which have led to such results; for you have on your part shown a double amount of selfishness.
"In the first place, in raising at your pleasure the toll on the Baltic; for I have been told by honest trustworthy seafaring folk, that you have exacted from people, not only from fifteen to thirty, but up to forty, nay, even to fifty out of a hundred, and have troubled all hearts by this rapacity; and as no improvement has taken place, but commerce has been thereby miserably straitened, and many honest people have been lamentably brought to beggary, the minds of men being thereby much embittered, your best friends began at first to condemn you secretly, and at last through their falling fortunes were made your worst enemies. Would you throw the blame on the toll gatherers? They are your servants. It is a well-known rule of law: what I do by my servant is as though done by myself. You appear to me exactly like him who carried off a pair of shoes secretly and offered them afterwards to the holy Benno.
"The states and cities of the Empire, so long as they were in your hands, contributed fully and sufficiently to your maintenance; many, nay too many, to say the least of it, as a proof of their fidelity, have lost soul and body, wealth and life, nay all their privileges, and, in a great measure, religion itself. Ratisbon testifies to this. Augsburg laments over it. All grieve together over it. You have allowed the old regiments to dissolve, have completed no companies, nor paid either new or old, notwithstanding you have demanded, and in fact received large sums of money from many Diets; I say nothing of what you have extorted from your enemies in their own countries. How has this money been spent? In superfluous pomp and luxury which is hateful to every one. We have observed this silently, and made a virtue of necessity. The children of Israel, when they had intercourse with the daughters of their enemies, and afterwards boasted of their victory, and tormented their brethren of Judah with the hardest yoke of bondage, were both times severely punished by God. And shall it fare better with you who have exercised more than Turkish cruelty in many evangelical places? The corn from the monastery of Magdeburg, the Dukedom of Brunswick and other places, has been thrashed out and carried off in heaps from the country, sold at a very high price, and the money spent for your own use, nothing given to the poor soldiers; the country people, harassed to death, are dying of hunger; and many fortresses, from avarice, either not supplied with provisions, or not amply provided with powder and shot, and, in short, general mismanagement. Now we see ourselves everywhere abandoned by fortune, so that at last we discover there is no money in hand, and no people to be got, as those who were available have run away, and the remainder will no longer be restrained by martial law. Dear friends, think you of the saying of Boccalini: 'When the prince leads the life of Lucifer, what wonder that the subjects become devils!'
"Our politicians know well that the Electors hold kingly rank in the Empire. But who has exalted himself above them with kingly magnificence, a great retinue and boundless expense, is it not your chief (Oxenstiern)? Do you think that this has not been complained of at every court? His Kingly Majesty of Christian memory never did the like. From these and countless other reasons the Princes, states, and cities have become first secretly, and then publicly offended with you; to this may be added a conduct towards the established inhabitants which they cannot well bear, when foreigners place themselves higher than their native princes.
"You say that electoral Saxony should have made peace by force of arms. Let us leave that uncertain. It is known to every one that certain persons have helped to shove the cart into the mud, and afterwards left it there. If electoral Saxony has been wrong, you with your procedures are not less guilty. In short, every one, be he who he may, has sought his own advantage; therefore Magdeburg lies in ashes, Wismar is in ruins, Augsburg is bound with the fetters of servitude, Nuremberg is in peril of death, Ulm is in quotidian fever, Strasburg has passed to the French, Frankfort has the jaundice, and the whole Empire is consumed. The enemy have beaten with rods, but you have chastised with scorpions. The Wallensteiners inflicted wounds, and you physicians have applied drawing plasters as a remedy instead of oil, have corrupted the blood and fastened yourselves on like a crab; such a crab must either be cut out by force, or satisfied daily by inordinate sums of money. The last is out of our power, the first we do not wish to do to you, but cannot help it. If God thus harasses you it is your own fault. Meanwhile, do you think that God has a flaxen beard, and will allow himself to be led by the nose? Oh, no, He sees well that you shelter yourselves under the name of freedom, that you make use of the cloak of the gospel, and at the same time live as Turks.
"You cry out much about the Spanish monarchy. I have no fears of it. Give me one of the best chemists who is sufficiently scientific to know how to mingle earth and ores, so that they will hold together firm and infrangible, and then let us see whether we have to fear the Spanish monarchy. But I am afraid that France will be to us Germans, the broken reed of Egypt, which will pierce the hand of whoever leans on it. All empires have their fixed time appointed by God, and a boundary across which they cannot pass. First they arise, then grow like boys; some improve as youths, remain for a time at a standstill in their manhood, then decline, become old, languish and at last die; nay, are so utterly annihilated, that one scarcely knows that they have existed. This course of things cannot be prevented by any human wisdom. The wise man sees this, and prepares himself beforehand; the fool does not believe it, and is ruined, like the surviving Generals of Alexander the Great, who so long divided his conquests, till the Romans became their masters. And truly the Empire has great need to rid herself at last of foreign physicians.
"I have been severe, but a steel axe is necessary to sever such a hard knot, one cannot cut with a fur coat.
"It is asked what will be the issue? It rests with God. Have you had too little bloodshed? Let God be the judge, and fly ye from his wrath. Although the Church still suffers, it is not yet dead. You cannot complain that you have gained nothing for the money you have spent and the dangers you have undergone. You have brought copper out of your country, but carried silver and gold back to it. Sweden, before this war, was of wood thatched with straw, now it is of stone, and splendidly adorned, and that you have obtained from the abducted vessels of Egypt. This no one would grudge you if you would only thank God yourselves for it. The Germans have indeed been excited to rise against their Emperor, but they will take no one who is not of their race and language. If the house of Austria has done evil, God will truly search it out. As concerns the French, I know well that God will, through them, punish Germany; for we have daily imitated in manners, ceremonies, demeanour, and entertainments, in language and clothing, together with music, this nation of apish behaviour and dress, and frivolous manners. How can we expect better than to fall into their hands? But the Frenchman will not therefore become our Emperor. To him belongs the Lily, the Eagle to the Germans, the East to the Turks, and the West to the Spaniards. None among them can reach higher.
"I must hope that it will not be taken amiss of me, that I have so roundly described these transactions. But frankness suits a German well. Would to God that any one had in good time thus placed the matter before you. Now we can indeed complain, but help, none either will or can give. God alone will and can help us; to Him we must pray that He may at last have compassion on us, and turn the hearts of the high potentates to love and long-wished-for peace."
Here ends the flying-sheet. The author, without putting sympathy with the Imperialists in the foreground, evidently belongs less to the Swedish party than we do now. Undoubtedly the Swedish soldiers and officers had become merciless devils, like the Imperialists, and, like them, they ruined the country and people. But it was not their exorbitant demands which hindered the peace, but the injustice of the Emperor, who still continued to raise the execrable pretension to subdue the life and freedom of the nation to his interest. Had it been possible for the Hapsburgers to assure freedom of faith, and the independence of the Imperial tribunals, almost all the German princes would have succumbed to him to drive away the foreigners. But the struggle stood thus: either the nation must 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.