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The Thirty Years War — Volume 01 by Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
page 15 of 99 (15%)
flowed into the exchequer of the princes, and the armies which marched
to the field; and, in the ardent excitement produced in all minds by the
peril to which their faith was exposed, the subject felt not the
pressure of those burdens and privations under which, in cooler moments,
he would have sunk exhausted. The terrors of the Spanish Inquisition,
and the massacre of St. Bartholomew's, procured for the Prince of
Orange, the Admiral Coligny, the British Queen Elizabeth, and the
Protestant princes of Germany, supplies of men and money from their
subjects, to a degree which at present is inconceivable.

But, with all their exertions, they would have effected little against a
power which was an overmatch for any single adversary, however powerful.
At this period of imperfect policy, accidental circumstances alone could
determine distant states to afford one another a mutual support. The
differences of government, of laws, of language, of manners, and of
character, which hitherto had kept whole nations and countries as it
were insulated, and raised a lasting barrier between them, rendered one
state insensible to the distresses of another, save where national
jealousy could indulge a malicious joy at the reverses of a rival. This
barrier the Reformation destroyed. An interest more intense and more
immediate than national aggrandizement or patriotism, and entirely
independent of private utility, began to animate whole states and
individual citizens; an interest capable of uniting numerous and distant
nations, even while it frequently lost its force among the subjects of
the same government. With the inhabitants of Geneva, for instance, of
England, of Germany, or of Holland, the French Calvinist possessed a
common point of union which he had not with his own countrymen. Thus,
in one important particular, he ceased to be the citizen of a single
state, and to confine his views and sympathies to his own country alone.
The sphere of his views became enlarged. He began to calculate his own
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