It may perhaps be said that the assurance given by the Peace of Westphalia was after all no better than the assurance given by the Peace of Augsburg, but even so far as the letter of the two documents was concerned, this was very far from being the case. The Peace of Augsburg was full of uncertainties, because the contracting parties were unable to abandon their respective desires. In the Peace of Westphalia all was definite. Evasion or misinterpretation was no longer possible. [Sidenote: § 8. General desire for the continuance of peace.] If the letter of the two treaties was entirely different, it was because the spirit in which they were conceived was also entirely different. In 1555 Protestantism was on the rise. The peace of 1555 was a vain attempt to shut out the tide by artificial dykes and barriers. In 1648 the tide had receded. The line which divided the Protestant from the Catholic princes formed almost an exact division between the Protestant and Catholic populations. The desire for making proselytes, once so strong on both sides, had been altogether extinguished by the numbing agony of the war. All Germany longed for peace with an inexpressible longing. The mutual distrust of Catholic and Protestant had grown exceedingly dull. The only feeling yet alive was hatred of the tyranny and exactions of the soldiers. SECTION III.--_Condition of Germany._ [Sidenote: § 1. Effects of the war.] What a peace it was when it really came at last! Whatever life there was under that deadly blast of war had been attracted to the camps. The strong man who had lost his all turned soldier that he might be able to rob others in turn. The young girl, who in better times would have passed on to a life of honourable wedlock with some youth who had been the companion of her childhood in the sports around the village fountain, had turned aside, for very starvation, to a life of shame in the train of one or other of the armies by which her home had been made desolate. In the later years of the war it was known that a body of 40,000 fighting men drew along with it a loathsome following of no less than 140,000 men, women, and children, contributing nothing to the efficiency of the army, and all of them living at the expense of the miserable peasants who still contrived to hold on to their ruined fields. If these were to live, they must steal what yet remained to be stolen; they must devour, with the insatiable hunger of locusts, what yet remained to be devoured. And then, if sickness came, or wounds--and sickness was no infrequent visitor in those camps--what remained but misery or death? Nor was it much better with the soldiers themselves. No careful surgeons passed over the battle-field to save life or limb. No hospitals received the wounded to the tender nursing of loving, gentle hands. Recruits were to be bought cheaply, and it cost less to enrol a new soldier than to cure an old one. [Sidenote: § 2. Decrease of the population.]