The Dutch people, in their great struggle against Philip II., seemed to find a stimulus in the very exhaustions of war.  The protesting ideas for which they fought drew fresh tenacity from the soil, wet with blood and tears, into which generous passion and resolution sank with every death.  Here it is plain that a milder conflict, carried on by intrigue and diplomatic forms alone, for peaceable separation from the Catholic interest, would not have so quickened the intelligence which afterwards nourished so many English exiles and helped to freight the Mayflower.  And we see the German mind first beginning to blossom with a language and a manifold literature during and after the Seven Years’ War, which developed a powerful Protestant State and a native German feeling.  Frederic’s Gallic predilections did not infect the country which his arms had rendered forever anti-Gallic and anti-Austrian.  The popular enthusiasm for himself, which his splendid victories mainly created, was the first instinctive form of the coming German sense of independence.  The nation’s fairest period coincided with the French Revolution and the aggressions of the Empire.  “Hermann and Dorothea” felt the people’s pulse, which soon beat so high at Jena and Leipsic with rage and hope.  The hope departed with the Peace of 1815, and pamphleteering, pragmatic writing, theological investigation, historical research, followed the period of creative genius, whose flowers did not wither while the fields ran red.

A war must be the last resort of truly noble and popular ideas, if it would do more than stimulate the intelligence of a few men, who write best with draughts of glory and success.  It must be the long-repressed understanding of a nation suffused with strong primitive emotions, that flies to arms to secure the precious privilege of owning and entertaining its knowledge and its national advantages.  And in proportion as any war has ever been leavened with the fine excitement of religion or humanity, however imperfectly, and though tyrannized over by political selfishness, we can see that the honest feeling has done something to obliterate the traces of violence, to offer the comfort of worth in the cause to wounded lips.

When the people themselves take to fighting, not for dynastic objects, to secure the succession of an Infant to the throne, to fix a Pope in his chair, or to horse a runaway monarch around their necks, not to extort some commercial advantage, or to resist a tampering with the traditional balance of power, but to drive back the billows of Huns or Turks from fields where cities and a middle class must rise, to oppose citizen-right to feudal-right, and inoculate with the lance-head Society with the popular element, to assert the industrial against the baronial interest, or to expel the invader who forages among their rights to sweep them clean and to plant a system which the ground cannot receive, then we find that the intense conviction, which has