cellor Oxenstiern, in April, 1633, as we have seen, called on the German people to send from themselves emigrants to America. In December, the upper four German circles confirmed the charter, and under its sanction a Protestant colony was planted on the Delaware. What monument has Wallenstein left like this on the Delaware to Gustavus?

The thirty years' war was not a civil war had the Germans been left to themselves, the Reformation would have been peacefully embraced by nine tenths of them. It was by hordes of other races and tongues that the battle of Jesuit reaction was fought. While France was rent in pieces by bloody and relentless feuds, Germany enjoyed a half century of prosperous peace, and with its kindred in the Netherlands and Switzerland formed the first nation in the world. Its universities, relieved from monastic traditions, taught not theology alone, but the method of the right use of reason, and sciences pregnant with modern culture. Kepler, a republican of Weil, the continuator of Copernicus, the forerunner of Newton, revealed the laws of the planetary motions. No part of Europe had so many industrious, opulent, and cultivated free cities; while the empire kept in use the forms and developed the language of constitutional government.

The terrible thirty years' effort to restore the old superstition crushed the enlightened middle class of Germany, destroyed its Hanseatic confederacy, turned its commerce into other channels, ruined its manufactures, arrested its progress in the arts, dismembered its public thought, gave to death one half or even two thirds of its inhabitants, transformed large districts of its cultivated country into a wilderness, suspended its unity and imperilled its national life, which was saved only by the indestructible energy of its people. From 1630, for more than two centuries, it showed no flag on any ocean, planted no colony on any shore; it had and could have no influence abroad, no foreign policy; it had ceased to be a great power. It lay like the massive remains of the Roman Colosseum, magnificent ruins, parcelled out among a crowd of rulers, and offering to neighboring princes an inviting quarry.

For German Protestants there were gleams of light from America and from Brandenburg. Driven by poverty and sorrow, the reckless devastation of foreign invasions, and the oppression of multitudinous domestic petty tyrants, the Germans, especially of the borders of the Rhine, thronged to America in such numbers that, in the course of a century, preserving their love of rural life, they appropriated much of the very best land from the Mohawk to the valley of Virginia.

At the close of the thirty years' war, Brandenburg had for its elector, Prussia for its duke, a prince by birth and education of the reformed church, trained in the republic of the Netherlands. "In my rule," said the young man, on first receiving homage, "I will always bear in mind that it is not my affair which I administer, but the affair of my people." "Consciences," he owned, "belong to God; no worldly potentate may force them." So, when the revocation of the edict of Nantes, in October, 1685, drove out of France a half million of "THE BEST" of the French nation, the noble company of exiles found a new country, partly with the Great Elector, and partly with the Protestant colonies in America.

The same Revolution of 1688, which excluded papists from the throne of England, restored liberty to the colonies in America, and made it safe for the son of the Great Elector to crown himself on his own soil as king of Prussia. As the elector of Saxony had meantime renounced the Reformation, to ride for a few stormy years on the restless waves of Polish anarchy, Leibnitz could say with truth: "The elector of Brandenburg is now the head of the Protestants in the empire." The pope of the hour, foreshadowing the policy of Kaunitz, denounced his coronation as a shamelessly impudent deed, and his house as one of which the dominions ought never to be increased.

The peace of Utrecht called forth the vehement reprobation of Leibnitz, and proved that the house of Hapsburg was not the proper guardian of Germany; yet it was full of good prophecies for the future, and marks the point of time when, in Europe and in America, the new civilization com

pelled the recognition of its right to existence. For England, it contained the acknowledgment by the Catholic powers of an exclusively Protestant succession, established by laws in derogation of legitimacy; for Italy, the elevation of the house of Savoy in the north to the rank of an independent and hopeful monarchy. For America and for Prussia, it was the dawn of the new day. In the former, Protestantism took the lead in the work of colonization and the appropriation of territory by the spread of settlements. Founded on the principle of civil freedom, the latter was received as a kingdom among the powers of the earth. From the moment when the elector of Brandenburg was admitted by all Europe to the society of kings as an equal, the house of Hapsburg knew that it had a rival within Germany.

When, in the second quarter of the last century, ecclesiastical intolerance drove the Lutherans of Salzburg into exile, a part of them found homes on the rivers of America, a part in the realm of that strange Prussian king, who, by simplicity and purity of life, by economy, strict organization of the government, care for the people and their education, public thrift, and perfect discipline in the army, bequeathed to his successor the most efficient state in Germany.

That successor was Frederic II., a prince trained alike in the arts of war and administration, in philosophy and letters. It should be incredible, and yet it is true, that, at the moment of the alliance of the Catholic powers against Protestantism, England, under the second George and a frivolous minister, was attempting by largesses of subsidies to set the force of Russia against the most considerable Protestant power in Germany. In the attempt, England shot so wildly from its sphere that Newcastle was forced to bend to Wilam Pitt; and then England and Prussia, and the embryon nited States,-Pitt, Frederic, and Washington, -worked ogether for human freedom. The seven years' war exended the English colonies to the Mississippi and gave Canada to England. "We conquered America in Germany," said the elder Pitt, ascribing to Frederic a share in the extension of the Germanic race in the other hemi

sphere; and, in like manner, Frederic, in his histories, treats the English movement in America and his own struggles in Europe all as one, so long as Pitt was at the helm.

To what end would events have been shaped if Pitt's ministry had continued, and the bonds between England and Prussia had been riveted by a common peace? But here, as everywhere, it is useless to ask what would have happened if the eternal Providence had for the moment suspended its rule. The American colonists were now at variance with the same class of British ministers which had wronged Frederic in 1762. With which branch of the Teutonic family would be the sympathy of Germany? The influence of Austria leaned to England. Where stood the true nobility of the empire, the masters of German thought and language? where its ruling princes? where its one incomparable king?

In the north-east of Germany, the man who, alone of Germans, can with Leibnitz take a place among the wise by the side of Plato and Aristotle, reformed philosophy as Luther had reformed the church, on the principle of the self-activity of the individual mind. As Luther owned neither pope nor prelates for any thing more than schoolfellows, so Kant accepted neither Leibnitz nor Hume for a master, and passed between dogmatism and doubt to the school of reason. His method was mind in its freedom, guided and encouraged, moderated and restrained, by the knowledge of its powers, by free analysis discovering the unvarying laws of reason, judgment, and action. Skepticism, he said, only strands the ship and leaves it high and dry to rot: the true inventory of the human faculties is the chart by which the pilot can take the ship safely wherever he will. He stopped at criticism as little as the traveller who waits to count his resources before starting on his journey, or as the general who musters his troops before. planning his campaign. The analysis of the acts of thought teaches faith in the intellect itself as the interpreter of nature. The human mind, having learned the limit of its faculties, and tolerating neither cowardice nor indolence in the use of them, goes forth in its freedom to interrogate the

moral and material world with the means of compelling an answer from both. "The forms of Kant's philosophy," says Schiller, "may change; its method will last as long as reason itself." And Rosenkranz adds: "He was the herald of the laws of reason, which nature obeys and which mind ought to obey."

The method of Kant being that of the employment of mind in its freedom, his fidelity to human freedom has never been questioned and never can be. He accepted the world as it is, only with the obligation that it is to be made better. His political philosophy enjoins a constant struggle to lift society out of its actual imperfect state, which is its natural condition, into a higher and better one, by deciding every question, as it arises, in favor of reform and progress, and keeping open the way for the elimination of all remaining evil.

Accustomed to contemplate nature in the infinity of its extent as forming one system, governed in all its parts and in its totality by one law, he drew his opinions on questions of liberty from elemental truth, and uttered them as if with the assent of the universe of being. As he condemned slavery, so he branded the bargaining away of troops by one state to another without a common cause. "The rights of man," he said, “are dear to God, are the apple of the eye of God on earth;" and he wished an hour each day set aside for all children to learn them and take them to heart. His friendship for America was therefore inherent and ineradicable. He was one of the first, perhaps the very first, of the German nation to defend, even at the risk of his friendships, the cause of the United States.

Lessing contemplated the education of his race as carried forward by one continued revelation of truth, the thoughts of God, present in man, creating harmony and unity, and leading toward higher culture. In his view, the class of nobles was become superfluous: the lights of the world were they who gave the clearest utterance to the divine ideas. He held it a folly for men of a republic to wish for a monarchy: the chief of a commonwealth, governing a free people by their free choice, has a halo that never surrounded a