A strong hereditary monarchy, such as arose in England and in France, would have anticipated the Germany of to-day by a thousand years and made it the predominant state in Christendom, but disruptive elements in the persons of great territorial dukes were successful throughout its history in preventing an effective concentration of power in the hands of the Emperor. That the German Emperor was regarded, though vaguely, as the overlord of all Christian monarchs was clearly indicated when Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France appeared as candidates for the imperial crown against Charles of Spain, afterward the Emperor Charles V. Europe was the Holy Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire was Europe predominantly until the Thirty Years’ War. This war was perhaps the greatest catastrophe of all the ghastly crimes committed in the name of religion. It destroyed an entire generation, taking each year for thirty years the finest manhood of the nations. Two-thirds of the population of Germany was destroyed, in some states such as Bohemia three-fourths of the inhabitants were killed or exiled, while out of 500,000 inhabitants in Würtemberg there were only 48,000 left at the end of the war. Terrible as this loss was, the destruction did not fall equally on the various races and classes in the community. It bore, of course, most heavily upon the big blond fighting man and at the end of the war the German states contained a greatly lessened proportion of Nordic blood. In fact, from that time on the purely Teutonic race in Germany has been largely replaced by the Alpine types in the south and by the Wendish and the Polish types in the east. This change of race in Germany has gone so far that it has been computed that out of the 70,000,000 inhabitants of the German Empire, only 9,000,000 are purely Teutonic in coloration, stature and skull characters. The rarity of pure Teutonic and Nordic types among the German immigrants to America in contrast to its almost universal prevalence among those from Scandinavia is traceable to the same cause. In addition, the Thirty Years’ War virtually destroyed the land owning yeomanry and lesser gentry formerly found in mediæval Germany as numerously as in France or in England. The religious wars of France, while not as devasting to the nation as a whole as was the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, nevertheless greatly weakened the French cavalier type, the “petite noblesse de province.” In Germany this class had flourished and throughout the Middle Ages contributed great numbers of knights, poets, thinkers, artists and artisans who gave charm and variety to the society of central Europe. But, as said, this section of the population was practically exterminated in the Thirty Years’ War and this class of gentlemen practically vanishes from German history from that time on.