It is true that during the last two centuries, agriculture, owing to the mighty effects of foreign traffic, has developed itself in an entirely new direction. The countryman also now cultivates field vegetables, clover, and other herbage for fodder, which were unknown before the Thirty years' war, and agricultural produce is more lucrative for an equal amount of population. Perhaps our ancestors lived in a poorer style, and farmed less. We can compare the stock of cattle. The number of cattle kept now in the villages is precisely the same as before the war; they have still the short, thick, curly-woolled Spanish herds, which used to be reared in the pens of the peasants; the old wool fell in long locks; but judging from the value of the cloth and stuffs woven from it, and the price of sheep at that time, it must have been good.
On the other hand, the stock of horses has diminished by three fourths in comparison with 1634. This striking circumstance can only be thus explained: that the traditions of the troopers of the middle ages exercised an influence even upon agriculture; that the rearing of horses was more profitable than now, on account of the bad roads which made a distant transport of corn impossible, whilst the lowing of cattle in the narrow farm-yards of the towns was so general that the sale of milk and butter paid little; and finally, that a larger portion of the country people were better able to maintain teams. The breaking up of the ground was then, as may be seen from the old farm books in Thuringia, somewhat--but not considerably--less than now. In the present day the number of goats and of cattle belonging to small farmers has increased, as also the number of oxen, which probably in Middle and Southern Germany are now finer and higher bred than formerly. This is a decided progress of the present day. But on the whole, reckoning the amount of fodder required, the number of beasts which are maintained with advantage is very inconsiderably larger at present than in 1634.
Thus Germany, in comparison with its happier neighbours in England and the Low Countries, was thrown back about two hundred years.
Still greater were the changes which the war made in the intellectual life of the nation. Above all among the country people. Many old customs passed away, life became aimless and full of suffering. In the place of the old household gear the rudest forms of modern furniture were introduced; the artistic chalices, and old fonts, and almost all the adornments of the churches, had disappeared, and were succeeded by a tasteless poverty in the village churches, which still continues. For more than a century after the war the peasant vegetated, penned in, almost as much as his herds, whilst his pastor watched him as a shepherd, and he was shorn by the landed proprietors and rulers of his country. There was a long period of gloomy suffering. The price of corn in the depopulated country was, for fifty years after the war, even lower than before. But the burdens upon landed property rose so high, that for a long time, land together with house and farm, bore little value, and sometimes were offered in vain as acquittance for service and imposts. Severer than ever was the pressure of vassalage, worst of all in the former Sclave countries, in which the peasantry were kept down by a numerous nobility. With respect to their marriages, they were placed under an unnatural and compulsory guardianship; strict care was taken that the son of the countryman should not evade by flight the servitude which was to weigh down his future. He could not travel without a written permission; even ship and raft masters were forbidden under severe penalties to take such fugitives into their service.
Much to be lamented is the injury to civilization which took place in the devastated cities, especially the return to luxury, love of pleasure, and coarse sensuality, the want of common sense and independence, the cringing towards superiors and heartlessness towards inferiors. They are the ancient sufferings of a decaying race. That the self-government of cities was more and more infringed upon by the princes, was frequently fortunate, for the administrators were too often deficient in judgment and feeling of duty.
The new constitution of governments which had arisen during the war, laid its iron hands on town and country. The old territories of the German empire were changed into despotic bureaucratic states. The ruler governed through his officials, and kept a standing army against his enemies; to maintain his "state," that is, his courtiers, officials and soldiers, was the task of the people. But to make this possible, it was necessary to promote carefully the increase of the population, and the greater tax-paying capacity of the subject. Some princes, especially the Brandenburgers, did this in a liberal spirit, and thus in this dark period, by increasing the power of their new state, laid the foundation of the greatness of their houses. Others indeed lavished the popular strength, in coarse imitation of French demoralization.
It was a mortal crisis through which Germany had passed, and dearly was the peace bought. But that which was most important had been preserved, the continuity of German development, the continuance of the great inward process, by which the German nation raised itself from the bondage of the middle ages to a higher civilization.
The long struggle, politically considered, was a defensive war of the Protestant party against the intolerance of the old faith and the attacks of the Imperial power. This defensive struggle had begun by an ill-timed offensive movement in Bohemia. The head of the House of Hapsburg had law and right on his side, so long as he only put down this movement. His opponents put themselves in the position of revolutionists, which could only be vindicated by success. But from the day when the Emperor made use of his victory to suppress by means of Jesuits and soldiers the sovereignty of the German princes, and the old rights of the cities, he became in his turn the political offender whose bold venture was repulsed by the last efforts of the nation. But here we must take a higher point of view, from which the proceedings of Ferdinand II. appear still more insupportable. Just a hundred years before his reign, all the good spirits of the German nation fought on the side of the Emperor, when he, in opposition to existing rights and old usages, had founded a German Church and German state. Since that, the family of Charles V. had for a century, a short time excepted, done much by laborious scheming, or listless indifference, to destroy the last source of this new life, independence of spirit, thought and faith: it was for a century, a short time excepted, the opponent of the national German life; it had its Spanish and Italian alliances, and had arrayed the Romish Jesuits against the indigenous civilization of the nation, aided, alas! by some of the German princes. It was by such means that it had endeavoured to become great in Germany, and in the same spirit, an overzealous Emperor called forth the bloody decision. On his head, not on the German people or Princes, lies the guilt of this endless war. The Protestant chiefs, with the exception of the lesser rulers, only sought to submit and make peace with their Emperor. It was only for a few years they were led into open war, by the arrogance of Wallenstein, the scorn of Vienna, and the warlike pressure of Gustavus Adolphus; the alliance of the great electoral houses of Saxony and Brandenburg with Sweden did not last four years; at the first opportunity they receded, and during the last period of the war, neutrality was their strongest policy.
The princes obtained by the peace the object of their defensive opposition; the extravagant designs of the Imperial Court were crushed. Germany was free. Yes, free! Devastated and powerless, with its western frontier for a century the fighting-ground and spoil of France, it had still to bear the out-pouring of an accumulated measure of humiliation and shame. But whoever would now clench their hands at this, let them beware of raising them against the Westphalian peace. The consequences that followed, the laying in ashes of the Palatinate, the seizure of Strasburg, the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, were not owing to this peace. The cause of all this, was long before the Thirty years' war; it had been foreseen by patriotic men long beforehand. Since the Smalkaldic war the sovereignty of the German Princes, and the independence of portions of the empire, were the only guarantee for a national progressive civilization. One may deeply lament, but can easily understand this. Now at last this independence had been legally established by streams of blood. Whoever considers the year 1813,--the first kindling of the people since 1648,--as full of glory; whoever has at any time ennobled himself by a sense of duty and enlarged moral sentiments, acquired from the severe teaching of Kant and his followers; whoever has at any time derived pleasure from the highest that man is capable of understanding, and from the nature and souls of his own and foreign people; whoever has at any time felt with transport the beauty of the new German poetry, the Nathan, Faust, and Guillaume Tell; whoever has taken a heartfelt participation in the free life of our science and arts, in the great discoveries of our natural philosophers, and in the powerful development of German industry and agriculture, must remember, that with the peace of Münster and Osnaburg began the period in which the political foundation of the development of a higher life was in a great measure secured.
The war had nevertheless consequences which we must still deeply deplore; it has long severed the third of Germany from intellectual communion of spirit with their kindred races. The German hereditary possessions of the Imperial family have ever since been united in a special state. Powerfully and incessantly has the foreign principle worked which there prevails. For a long time the depressed nation scarcely felt the loss. In Germany the opposition between Romanism and Protestantism had been weakened, and in the following century it was in a great measure overcome. Even those territories which were compelled by their rulers to maintain their old faith, had participated in the slow and laborious progress which had been made since the peace. It is not to be denied that the Protestant countries long remained the leaders, but in spite of much opposition, those of the old faith followed the new stream, and the results of increasing civilization flowed in brotherly union from one soul to another; joy and suffering were in general mutual, and as the political requirements and wishes of the Protestant and Roman Catholics were the same, the feeling of intellectual unity became gradually more active. It was otherwise in the distant countries which Ferdinand II. and his successors had bequeathed as conquered property. The losses which the German races had experienced were great, but the injury to the Austrian nationalities was incomparably greater. To them had happened what must now appear, to any one who examines accurately, most terrible. Almost the whole national civilization, which in spite of all hindrances had been developed for more than a century, was expelled with an iron rod. The mass of the people remained; their leaders--opulent landed proprietors of the old indigenous race, manly patriots, men of distinguished character and learning, and intelligent pastors, were driven into exile. The exiles have never been counted, who perished of hunger, and the horrors of war; those also who settled in foreign countries can scarcely be reckoned. Undoubtedly their collective number amounted to hundreds of thousands. It is thanks to the Bohemian exiles, that Electoral Saxony recovered its loss in men and capital quicker than other countries. Yet it is not the numbers, however great, which give a true representation of the loss. For those who fell into calamity on account of their faith and political convictions were the noblest spirits, the leaders of the people, the representatives of the highest civilization of the time. But it was not the loss of them alone that made the Emperor's dominions so weak and dormant; the millions also that remained behind were crushed. Driven by every low motive, by rough violence or the prospect of earthly advantage, from one faith to another, they had lost all self-respect and the last ideal which even the most commonplace man preserves, the feeling that he has a place in his heart that cannot be bought. Everywhere throughout Germany in the worst times after the war, there were thousands who were fortified by the feeling that they also, like their fathers and neighbours, had resisted armed conversion to the death. In the converted Austrian territories of the Emperor, this feeling was rare. For almost a century and a half the Bohemian and German races vegetated in a dreary dream life. The Bohemian countryman hung the various saints of the restored church by the side of his pictures of Huss and Zisko, but he kept a holy lamp burning before the old heretic; the citizen of Vienna and Olmutz accustomed himself to speak of the Empire and Germany as of a foreign land; he accommodated himself to Hungarians, Italians, and Croats, but at the same time he remained a stranger in the new state in which he was now domiciled. Little did he care for the categorical imperative, imposed by the new worldly wisdom; later he learned that Schiller was a German poet. Only then did a new spring begin for the Germans, in which freedom of mind and beauty of soul were sought for as the highest aim of earthly life; when the new study of antiquity inspired them with enthusiasm, when the genius of Goethe irradiated the court of Weimar, then sounded from dormant Austria, the deepest and most mysterious of arts, a fullness of melody. There also the spirit of the people had found touching expression in Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.