=469. Summary of the political development.=—It will be necessary, therefore, in the following pages, to refer frequently to the events of political history, and for the convenience of the reader a brief summary is here given of the course of that history. The Napoleonic wars wiped out the smallest and most backward of the German states, reducing the number from over three hundred to about forty. Then, until near the middle of the century, progress depended on negotiations between these states by which the worst effects of their separation were removed. In 1848 a liberal movement reformed the government of some of the important states on modern lines, and strengthened the demand for a unified Germany, leaving still undecided, however, the question whether Prussia or Austria was to be the leading state. The war of 1866 between the two states gave the leadership to Prussia; and the war of 1870 with France led finally to the foundation of the modern German Empire, under which at last the people found room for commercial expansion and advanced with astonishing rapidity. =470. Conditions of Germany about 1815.=—In spite of the service which Napoleon did Germany by abolishing the smallest states, the country was still splintered into pieces in 1815. A network of tariff frontiers covered the land, cutting the great rivers and the natural high-roads of commerce, and preventing the movement of wares. Not only did each state have its own tariff; some had internal tariffs in addition. The single state of Prussia had altogether some sixty tariffs. Some of the states were made of scattered pieces, interspersed among the territories of their neighbors; even a small state might consist of eight or ten fragments. A merchant, to reach the center of the country from the national frontier, crossed about sixteen tariff boundaries. Not only the customs tariffs consumed time and money. The separatism which they represented spread into all parts of the organization; there were seventeen different postal systems in the country; nearly threescore different laws on bills of exchange; hundreds of different coins. =471. Backwardness of commerce and manufactures.=—The difficulties of internal commerce were so great that the life of the people was arranged in large part to enable them to exist without trade. Most of the people were engaged in agriculture and supplied themselves with nearly all the necessaries of life. Manufactures were still carried on almost exclusively by scattered artisans. The German governments still clung to the old ideas of the gild system and public regulation. Little by little these ideas fell into the background in the first half of the nineteenth century, but it is important to note that they were still a living force in Germany when England had discarded them and was in the full rush of the developing factory system.