11)12] on the Ejjccts of the lldrtij Years' War. 81)3 



to the development, as in self-defence, of this branch of educational 

 activity. 



When, at last, the intervention of France had, by the unequal 

 skill of her policy and the success of her great generals, been carried 

 to such a point, that even after she had concluded peace with the 

 Protestant princes of the centre and the north-west, the power of the 

 Emperor could not prevail against it, her weight in the scale could 

 not but determine the conditions of the general pacification, which 

 it gradually became impossible to defer any longer so far as the 

 Empire at large was concerned. France, as we have already noticed, 

 declined to enter the Empire as one of its component states ; but 

 its material and moral forces had now been so effectually weakened, 

 and the strength of national sentiment to such an extent impaired 

 — though it is an error to suppose it to have been utterly extin- 

 guished — that though peace was signed between France and the 

 Empii-e, the gates were really flung open to the continuous encroach- 

 ments of the former Power. The age of Louis XV. was at hand, 

 and all that it meant for Germany — the breaking-up of her Imperial 

 defences in the west, in order that the rival ambitions of her 

 princes might be gratified, the consummation of the rape of Elsass 

 by the long series of reunions and by the surprise of Strassburg, 

 the devastation of the Palatinate in the Orleans AVar, the demon- 

 stration of the national helplessness and the bitter disappointment 

 (as in the case of the barren victory of Brandenburg over th(; Swedes) 

 of the hopes even of those who greatly daring helped themselves, the 

 closing of the future, as it seemed, which accompanied the present 

 undoing. By the end of the century France was the arch foe, as 

 which she presented herself to the consciousness of the German people 

 for generations — but it was the Great AYar which made this result 

 possible, and which had shaped with unmistakable definiteness the 

 stages of its achievement. 



The political effects proper of the AVar, though a recital of them 

 is among the commonplaces of modern history, are not on that ac- 

 count the less deserving of careful investigation ; but it was not jDart 

 of my intention to-night to take you once more over this well-known 

 ground. The AVar had destroyed most of what before its outbreak 

 had remained to recall the earlier and more vigorous life, or substituted 

 for it new and alien formations. So with its military organization, 

 which had been rent in twain. So with its constitutional life, for the 

 Eatisbon Diet, abandoning all thoughts of reconstruction, merely 

 kept giving the machinery without which the Empire would have 

 lacked even tlie semblance of unity. The Emperor was driven back 

 upon the family policy, which — unless it were in the warding off of the 

 Eastern peril— could no longer even appeal for a common endeavour 

 for national ends. The princes came to him for his alliance — though 

 a vague prestige and the right of conferring favours of rank of place 

 still attached to it — much as they came to any other power ; or even 



