372 Mr. A. W. Ward [March 8, 



this, by the way ; together with a hint that the Swedish atrocities, 

 which are traditionally connected with the later years of the War, were 

 not very Swedish — in the year 1639, the Swedish armies, which 

 harried so many regions of the Empire, are said to have not con- 

 tained more than 500 Swedes. 



Thus there was added to the horrors and sufferings of war the un- 

 utterable weariness inseparable from a conflict to which there seems 

 no end, because the objects for which it is carried on are unrecogniz- 

 ably disguised or hopelessly confused. "When peace came at last, and 

 when the reckoning into some of the details, of which we are about to 

 enquire, had to be cast up, the one clear gain for the Empire at large, 

 ascribable to the protracted prosecution of this ever-shifting War, was 

 the establishment of the principle of parity between the three great 

 Christian confessions into which it was divided. This gain, the 

 announcement of which found a responsive echo even among the 

 political and religious contentions of distracted England, could not 

 be, and was not, again lost to Germany ; but, for the present, a dark 

 shadow was cast over it by the great exception on which the Emperor 

 had successfully insisted. Protestant worship of either kind was 

 excluded from all the dominions of the House of Austria ; and this 

 exception covered that very Bohemian kingdom where the violent 

 resistance to the Catholic reaction had provoked the outbreak of 

 the Great War. Sic vos non voUs — could a more signal instance be 

 suggested of the paradoxical results of war ? 



Among the effects which this War left behind it, and at some of 

 which I propose to invite you to glance in turn, the very first, as the 

 most obvious of all, is the numerical effect upon the population of 

 the Empire. The German economists and political philosophers of 

 the generation which followed upon that of the Thirty Years' War 

 were remarkably alive, as well they might be, to the primary import- 

 ance for the welfare of a state of a numerous population living under 

 conditions suitable for its due support ; but the science of statistics 

 was still unborn, and estimates of the advance or decline of population 

 even in quiet times can often only be accepted with the aid of a good 

 deal of faith. More recent criticism cannot therefore be blamed for 

 treating sceptically such traditions as those which have been confidently 

 handed on from generation to generation, and according to which 

 the War and its immediate effects entailed upon Germany a loss of 

 something like 12 millions out of a population of 1<S or 20 millions. 

 This' calculation should not, in my opinion, be contemptuously re- 

 jected as altogether wide of the mark ; but it must be allowed to rest 

 on a basis not satisfactory enough to shut out the possibility of very 

 great exaggeration. (The case stands otherwise, as you know, with 

 the estimate which concludes the Black Death to have swept away 

 more than half the population of England in its visitations about the 

 middle of the fourteenth century.) The estimated loss of popula- 

 tion in the course of the Thirty Years' War covers, as has been 



