"I must hope that it will not be taken amiss of me, that I have so roundly described these transactions. But frankness suits a German well. Would to God that any one had in good time thus placed the matter before you. Now we can indeed complain, but help, none either will or can give. God alone will and can help us; to Him we must pray that He may at last have compassion on us, and turn the hearts of the high potentates to love and long-wished-for peace." Here ends the flying-sheet. The author, without putting sympathy with the Imperialists in the foreground, evidently belongs less to the Swedish party than we do now. Undoubtedly the Swedish soldiers and officers had become merciless devils, like the Imperialists, and, like them, they ruined the country and people. But it was not their exorbitant demands which hindered the peace, but the injustice of the Emperor, who still continued to raise the execrable pretension to subdue the life and freedom of the nation to his interest. Had it been possible for the Hapsburgers to assure freedom of faith, and the independence of the Imperial tribunals, almost all the German princes would have succumbed to him to drive away the foreigners. But the struggle stood thus: either the nation must be crushed, and all the ideas suppressed, which had grown up in the German soil for one hundred and forty years, or the pretensions of the Imperial House must be certainly and fundamentally overcome: The last was impossible to the Germans without the help of Sweden. Thus on a retrospect of those years, every one will be well disposed to Sweden, who does not consider it a mere accident that well-known men of later times, like Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Humboldt did not blossom out of the country in which hundreds of thousands were driven from Church and school, by the Jesuits of Ferdinand II. But at that period the patriot undoubtedly felt the weakness of the Empire more than all the fearful misery of the people. And great ground there was for anxiety about the future. From this point of view this brochure is to us the first expression of that feeling which still, in the present day, unites hundreds of thousands of Germans. That love of Fatherland took root in the oppressed souls of our ancestors during the Thirty years' war, which has not yet attained to political life by a unity of constitutions. Such a feeling indeed only existed then in the minds of the noblest. But we must honour those who, in a century poor in hope, left in their teaching and writings, as an inheritance to their descendants, the idea of a German Empire. After Banner's devastating expedition all was quiet in Germany. Almost all the news and State records which the war had left, flowed from the press. In the last years thousands of printed sheets were filled with the negotiations for peace. Finally the peace was announced to the poor people in large placards. CHAPTER V. THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR.--THE CITIES.