Poor children were "sitting at their doors almost starved to death," his Excellency giving them food and leaving money with their parents to help them, if but for a time. In the Upper Palatinate, they passed "by churches demolished to the ground, and through woods in danger, understanding that Croats were lying hereabout." Further on they stayed for dinner at a poor little village "which hath been pillaged eight-and-twenty times in two years, and twice in one day." And so on, and so on. The corner of the veil is lifted up in the pages of the old book, and the rest is left to the imagination to picture forth, as best it may, the misery behind. After reading the sober narrative, we shall perhaps not be inclined to be so very hard upon the Elector of Saxony for making peace at Prague. CHAPTER X. THE PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE. SECTION I.--_Open Intervention of France._ [Sidenote: § 1. Protestantism not yet out of danger.] The peacemakers of Prague hoped to restore the Empire to its old form. But this could not be. Things done cannot pass away as though they had never been. Ferdinand's attempt to gain a partizan's advantage for his religion by availing himself of legal forms had given rise to a general distrust. Nations and governments, like individual men, are "tied and bound by the chain of their sins," from which they can be freed only when a new spirit is breathed into them. Unsatisfactory as the territorial arrangements of the peace were, the entire absence of any constitutional reform in connexion with the peace was more unsatisfactory still. The majority in the two Upper Houses of the Diet was still Catholic; the Imperial Council was still altogether Catholic. It was possible that the Diet and Council, under the teaching of experience, might refrain from pushing their pretensions as far as they had pushed them before; but a government which refrains from carrying out its principles from motives of prudence cannot inspire confidence. A strong central power would never arise in such a way, and a strong central power to defend Germany against foreign invasion was the especial need of the hour. [Sidenote: § 2. The allies of France.]