380 Jlr. A. W. Ward [March s, 



On the Rhine, the ancient imperial cities of Cologne and Aachen had 

 fallen from their former prosperity, and for a long time German 

 trade could in these no longer hold up its head against that of the 

 Dutch. The competition was not so ruinous higher up, on the 

 Maine. Frankfort, which had suffered terriljly from pestilence and 

 famine in the earlier part of the War, afterwards, though not in the 

 same measure as Leipzig, showed recuperative power. Very different 

 was, in its results at the end of the War, the experience of the great 

 Franconian towns, Niirnberg and Augsburg, across the history of 

 whose many centuries of vigorous and honourable prosperity the War 

 seemed to have drawn a bar which it would take long to remove. 

 The numljer of the inhabitants of Augsburg had in the earlier half 

 of the War sunk from 80,000 to 17,000 or less— and of the weavers 

 and their families who before its outbreak numbered nearly what was 

 now the sum total of the entire population, only a few hundred were 

 left. Thus, in this case, almost an entire industry, which occupied or 

 fed not far short of a quarter of the population, was virtually extinct. 

 Within the ancient walls of Niirnberg, in face of which in the 

 middle of the War two of its most formidable commanders and their 

 armies had met, to separate again as after a drawn game, famine and 

 disease had raged with similar results. The great Bavarian city of 

 Ratishon had ceased to be a trading town ; and as one of our author- 

 ities chooses to put it, had to console itself with being the established 

 seat of the Diet— a very wordy and windy consolation. 



The decay of industry, as already observed, is even more striking 

 than that of trade, though the prosperity of both was of course in- 

 separably bound together. The former was not due to any falling off 

 in the aptitude of the Germans as technical workmen, or to a more 

 than ordinary unwillingness, fostered by the continued endurance of 

 the guild-system, to make use of now inventions or improvements, 

 especially in the direction of machinery ; but it was intensified by 

 the continuous competition of other countries not similarly hampered 

 by a growing deficiency of labour. For the cloth looms of Westphalia 

 and the potteries of Hesse could no more than the vineyards and 

 orchards of the Palatinate be worked without labourers ; in Bavaria 

 too, where the cloth and linen manufactures had attained to consider- 

 able prosperity, a complete and lasting stagnation had set in through- 

 out these widespread industries. In Saxony the recovery seems to 

 have been quicker — hastened, no doubt, by qualities which have 

 always distinguished her population — intelligence and frugality. 

 But I must not carry on the dreary catalogue further, or point 

 out how the War ruined for a long time the nascent commercial and 

 industrial prosperity of Brandenburg, which iifter its close had to be 

 nursed up again by sustained administrative efforts, which call for our 

 admiration as fully as does the military prowess generally held to have 

 laid the foundations of the greatness of the Prussian State — or, on 

 the other hand, how those of the Habsburg lands which had not lieen 



