374 J/r. A. W. Ward [March 8, 



(how we used to be taught to detest the craven poHcy of the Elector 

 John George, who was all for peace !) ; or of Franconia, Gustavus's 

 own chosen prize, where the population sank so low that monastic 

 vows before the age of 60 had to be prohibited, the marriage of clerics 

 was stopped, and laymen were allowed to take two wives each. I 

 confess that I am not impressed by the suggestion that elsewhere 

 there may have been a compensatory increase of population. Of course, 

 we need not assume that in all the endless cases of the depopulation 

 of villages, which in a very large proportion of them actually amounted 

 to utter destruction, the population which their place of habitation 

 knew no more was literally annihilated — and, in the case of the towns, 

 we know that even in Magdeburg there was not an end of all things. 

 Many peasants must have shifted their dwelling-place, and we know 

 in what large numbers they took up their refuge in the towns — like 

 the people of Attica within the walls of Athens — so that in Weimar, 

 for instance, we read that towards the end of the war the number of 

 immigrants was double that of the natives. Many men, women and 

 children, too, must have been absorbed into that floating element of 

 population, which, after being unhoused and unsettled by the tide of 

 the War, followed the endless marches of the armies as an untold and 

 untenable contingent of beggars and brigands. When peace returned, 

 this vagabond part of the population was not extinguished, but waited 

 to be revived in later days of warfare, as indeed it was very notably 

 in the early wars of the French Revolution. The vagabonds who 

 represented the homeless element in the population, including swarms 

 of disbanded soldiers, coalesced with the gipsies — a class of nomads 

 long regarded as standing outside the social community, but which, 

 being thus reinforced, remained in Germany a more dangerous and 

 in some respects a more important element in the population than else- 

 where. My immediate point, however, is the decrease of the calcul- 

 able in favour of the incalculable element in the population, by the 

 wholesome uprooting of peasants whose expulsion from their homes 

 was a direct effect of the War. 



Altogether, after room has been found for inevitable exaggera- 

 tion, and after all deductions have been allowed which ought reason- 

 ably to be made from the points of view indicated, we shall probably 

 be willing to subscribe to the conclusion with which few economic 

 historians of the present day and few statisticians seem prepared to 

 quarrel, that during the Thirty Years' War the population of Germany 

 had sunk to one-half its previous total, or perhaps between one-half 

 and two-thirds. This is the conclusion of Schmoller, the results of 

 whose investigations, especially for north-eastern and eastern Germany 

 are authoritative ; and I do not think that any hazard will be run in 

 accepting it. 



It was the peasantry, in which of course lay the real strength of 

 the greater portion of the Empire, that beyond all doubt suffered 

 most heavily from the effects of the War. Schiller, whose Camp of 



