The princes obtained by the peace the object of their defensive opposition; the extravagant designs of the Imperial Court were crushed. Germany was free. Yes, free! Devastated and powerless, with its western frontier for a century the fighting-ground and spoil of France, it had still to bear the outpouring of an accumulated measure of humiliation and shame. But whoever would now clench their hands at this, let them beware of raising them against the Westphalian peace. The consequences that followed, the laying in ashes of the Palatinate, the seizure of Strasburg, the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, were not owing to this peace. The cause of all this, was long before the Thirty years' war; it had been foreseen by patriotic men long beforehand. Since the Smalkaldic war the sovereignty of the German Princes, and the independence of portions of the empire, were the only guarantee for a national progressive civilization. One may deeply lament, but can easily understand this. Now at last this independence had been legally established by streams of blood. Whoever considers the year 1813,--the first kindling of the people since 1648,--as full of glory; whoever has at any time ennobled himself by a sense of duty and enlarged moral sentiments, acquired from the severe teaching of Kant and his followers; whoever has at any time derived pleasure from the highest that man is capable of understanding, and from the nature and souls of his own and foreign people; whoever has at any time felt with transport the beauty of the new German poetry, the Nathan, Faust, and Guillaume Tell; whoever has taken a heartfelt participation in the free life of our science and arts, in the great discoveries of our natural philosophers, and in the powerful development of German industry and agriculture, must remember, that with the peace of Münster and Osnaburg began the period in which the political foundation of the development of a higher life was in a great measure secured.