1912] 071 the Effects of the Thirty Years' War. 369 



to bury the French Revolution and all its works. There were few 

 to cast a thought back, from the solemn formalities ushering in the 

 balanced deliberations of the AVestphalian Congress, to the arrogant 

 pertinacity with which the proud Ultraquist nobles had defied what 

 they deemed the decadent authority of the House of Austria, and 

 the revived activity of the hated Roman curia with whose interests 

 that House was once more identifying its own, and had given the 

 signal of irreconcilable war by hurling the official servitors of the 

 Imperial policy out of the windows of the Hradschin into the gaping 

 foss below. Thirty years had well-nigh passed ; Bohemian Protestant- 

 ism seemed to have gone the way of Austrian ; even of the German 

 evangelical world only a fraction still stood in arms against the 

 House of Habsburg ; and the problem to be settled concerned not 

 the briefed rights of a kingdom beneath its sway, but the " satisfac- 

 tion " of the claims of two great foreign Powers, neither of which 

 had visibly so much as cast a shadow over the situation of things in 

 which the outbreak of the conflict had intervened. 



Yet the continuity of the Great War, which, by prolonging it 

 without a break, gave impetus to the rolling flood, and volume to the 

 effects — political, social, moral — which it produced, remains incontest- 

 able. Indeed, as it would not take long to show, it exemplifies, with 

 almost unsurpassed fullness and variety, what to me has always seemed 

 one of the most appalling features of all great wars— and by no 

 means only of those of the obsolete, long-drawn-out. Thirty lears' 

 War sort, of which nowadays military historians can hardly write, or 

 those who have seen what we have seen, read or think, with patience. 

 For what could be more appalling than that the bloody arbitrament 

 of war should be invoked, and that the whole Iliad of woes which 

 must follow in its train should be brought down upon a nation, 

 perhaps upon more than one nation, for a stated purpose, and that, 

 this purpose having been either acliieved or missed, the conflict, 

 with all its attendant evils, should continue, as it were automatically, 

 for some new end — be it some heightened ambition, or some in- 

 creased gain, or the settlement, hitherto unapproachable, of some 

 long-lived national or international problem, or, too often, because 

 the deadly brood of passions once let loose, cannot, without induce- 

 ments undreamt of at the outset, be called into leash again ! 



But, without drawing between this Thirty Years' War and later 

 wars parallels which the case would not bear — and indeed I for one 

 think the seductive game of so-called historical parallels very rarely 

 worth playing— think for a moment, if only by way of recalling to 

 yourselves the breadth and variety of the ground from which we are 

 to choose some points or passages in illustration of the bearings of 

 our theme — think for a moment of the awful chain, if I may so call 

 it, which made up the totality of the struggle. The bold attempt of 

 the Bohemian leaders to determine the destinies of their own and the 

 dependent countries, and to secure a free enjoyment of their faith 



