BEFORE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
and left a heritage of strife that made Germany a battlefield for a generation. Since the Middle Ages no greater calamity fell upon any European nation than came to Germany with the Thirty Years' War. The ruin of great and flourishing cities, the destruction of ancient festivals and quaint customs, the brutalizing of the rural population throughout a generation of strife, all this left its mark upon the Germany that travelers visited in the eighteenth century.
Following the Thirty Years' War came the ravaging of the Palatinate in 1688, the War of the Spanish Succession, and the Seven Years' War. In these wars much of the earlier brutality continued. Prosperous and beautiful German cities were laid in ashes and countless villages made uninhabitable.
Already in the seventeenth century progress was sadly arrested. Public spirit and public opinion almost died out. Bureaucrats and pedants held full sway. It was the day of small men and small things. Great centers of present-day industry, like Solingen, Essen, Krefeld, Elberfeld. Barmen, were in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries too insignificant to deserve mention.
Even late in the eighteenth century a semi-medieval character pervaded the atmosphere of Germany. The nobles, particularly in the Rhine districts, were too poor to keep up their ancient splendor, but they cherished all their surviving privileges and looked with contempt upon the peasantry. Throughout the Empire the laboring classes were in a far worse condition than in France. "The dwellers on the estates of the Prussian nobility in Silesia and Brandenburg were treated no better than negro slaves in America and the West Indies. They were not allowed to leave their villages, or to marry without their lords' consent; their children had to serve in the lords' families for several years at a nominal wage, and they themselves had to labour at least three days, and often six days, a week on their lords' estate. These corvées or forced labours occupied so much of the peasant's time that he could only
22
