Seldom, if ever, in the history of the world, has a calamity so awful befallen a people so highly endowed and so well fitted to excel in all the paths of progress. In every respect—economical, political, and moral—Germany in the Thirty Years’ War received wounds from which she has hardly recovered even to-day. Division and weakness at home invited interference and aggression from abroad. For generations it was the corner-stone of French policy to foster the divisions of Germany, and so to maintain her supremacy in Western Europe. The victories of the Great Frederick, the works of her great writers—Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe, and of her great philosophers—Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and the mighty struggles of the War of Liberation in 1813, did much to restore the national consciousness of Germany. But the disunion continued, and in her industrial organisation she was far behind England and France. Feudalism survived, especially in the regions east of the Elbe, far into the nineteenth century. The power-loom was not introduced, even into the more progressive Rhine country, till the middle of the nineteenth century. The results of the War of Liberation were, for the German people, most disappointing. After throwing off the French yoke, citizen and peasant alike found that the enthusiasm and devotion with which they had spent blood and treasure had been in vain. The German princes took to themselves all the fruits of victory, and the old abuses continued to flourish under the old _régime_. The only considerable reforms were those which had been established in the Rhine country by the hereditary enemy, the French, and which the German reaction did not venture to abolish. In these circumstances we need not wonder that a profound and brooding discontent began to occupy the best German minds. A Fatherland which was disunited at home and weak abroad, princely despotisms which fostered servility and raised a barrier to progress, backward methods and institutions which were all the more galling when contrasted with the pre-eminence which Germany had attained in literature and philosophy—how could any patriot be satisfied with such a wretched condition of affairs? Thus it happened that Germany took a leading part in the revolutionary troubles of 1848. Both at Vienna and Berlin the old _régime_ was for a time overturned; and a national Parliament met at Frankfort. But the German reformers were not united; they had no clear aims; and there was little or no material strength behind them. The reaction had been taken by surprise. But it wielded the organised military power, and so was able to act whilst the Liberals talked and proposed. Before the troubled year had come to a close the reaction was triumphant both in Vienna and Berlin.