378 31 r. A. W. Ward [March 8, 



tinue a neutrality which had hitherto proved so advantageous — 

 though, as they might have added, the advantage was theirs rather 

 than the Empire's. This candid request indicates the attitude which 

 the great maritime members of the Hanseatic League continued to 

 observe during the War. As a matter of fact, two out of the three 

 great maritime towns which after nominally renewing the decrepit 

 League towards the end of the War. preserved down to our own day 

 the ancient name which was all that was left of it — Hamburg and 

 Bremen — suffered perhaps less than any other of the more important 

 German towns during the course of the conflict ; and one of them, 

 Hamburg, which from the beginning of the 17 th century onwards, 

 had facilitated the advance through its portals of English trade into 

 Germany, turned the actual state of things to its own account with 

 remarkable skill. Liibeck, the venerable head of the Hansa, was 

 necessarily less favoured by fortune ; for the command of the Baltic 

 was one of the main ends to compass which first Denmark and then 

 Sweden entered into the "War, and the ultimate ambition of the 

 Scandinavian Powers contemplated nothing short of the extinction of 

 German navigation in its waters. Liibeck, instead of any share in 

 the rule of the blue sea over which she had once been mistress, had 

 to guard her ancient gateways against horsemen and pikemen ; and 

 even before the conclusion of the peace called by her name at the end 

 of the Danish War her citizens are found complaining of the diminu- 

 tion of her fleet, ship after ship, ill made up for by the unavoidable 

 increase of her military trained bauds. The credit of her great 

 merchant houses was beginning to give way, and a decline was setting 

 in to which there has hardly been a turn till the last quarter of the 

 nineteenth century. On the other German Baltic ports, in so far as 

 they w'ere within the orbit of the War, nearly all seem to have 

 followed her example, sharing the fortunes of the territories in which 

 they were situate or in which the terms of the War incorporated 

 them. Thus, Wismar and Rostock, the twin ports of the ill-starred 

 Mecklenburg duchies, were stricken down by the rush of the conflict 

 which made them for a time the spoils of the great Imperial captain ; 

 from the former comes the complaint that in six years not a single 

 vessel had weighed anchor in her harbour, and that her citizens 

 Capable of bearing arms had dwindled from 3000 to one-tenth of that 

 number, while out of this handful of men had in the same period 

 been extorted contributions amounting to 200,000 dollars. Pomer- 

 ania, we know, was in Swedish hands ; but further east, and beyond 

 the immediate range of the War, Danzig, long famed for the skill 

 with which, like another Ephesus, she had managed to preserve her 

 neutrality in the midst of armed conflicts around her, was little better 

 off tlian the towns of the Baltic south-west. This was partly due to 

 the consequences of the Polish Wars which paralysed her main trade 

 — partly to awful ravages of the plague in the first decade of the 

 war. 



