Denmark and Sweden, into the political system of Europe; and while on
the one hand the Protestant League was strengthened by their adhesion,
it on the other was indispensable to their interests. States which hitherto
scarcely concerned themselves with one another's existence,
acquired through the Reformation an attractive centre of interest,
and began to be united by new political sympathies. And as through
its influence new relations sprang up between citizen and citizen,
and between rulers and subjects, so also entire states were forced by it
into new relative positions. Thus, by a strange course of events,
religious disputes were the means of cementing a closer union
among the nations of Europe.

Fearful indeed, and destructive, was the first movement in which this
general political sympathy announced itself; a desolating war of thirty years,
which, from the interior of Bohemia to the mouth of the Scheldt,
and from the banks of the Po to the coasts of the Baltic,
devastated whole countries, destroyed harvests, and reduced towns and villages
to ashes; which opened a grave for many thousand combatants,
and for half a century smothered the glimmering sparks of civilization
in Germany, and threw back the improving manners of the country
into their pristine barbarity and wildness. Yet out of this fearful war
Europe came forth free and independent. In it she first learned
to recognize herself as a community of nations; and this intercommunion
of states, which originated in the thirty years' war, may alone be sufficient
to reconcile the philosopher to its horrors. The hand of industry
has slowly but gradually effaced the traces of its ravages,
while its beneficent influence still survives; and this general sympathy
among the states of Europe, which grew out of the troubles in Bohemia,
is our guarantee for the continuance of that peace which was the result
of the war. As the sparks of destruction found their way