The German Constitution

[p. 528]

|528| of such hostile elements, a hatred greater than any other, the principle that together they ought nevertheless to make up one state; [and if] this connection should itself have to be brought about by tyranny, then what is holiest to human beings, the demand for connection, has still remained. But that party which calls foreign powers to its aid gives up this principle; it has now by its deed abolished the connection of the state, even if its knowing and true intention is no other than to find protection, through this foreign aid, against an oppression which it is incapable of resisting by its own power.

After, in the Thirty Years’ War, the attempt of Denmark to become the saving genius of Germany had failed, and before Ferdinand’s armies, without resistance and without contradiction, not only that which is called German public law but all laws whatever fell silent, the noble Gustavus Adolphus came forward, almost with reluctance, for the German estates. His hero’s death on the battlefield did not let him complete his role of being the saviour of German freedom of the state and of conscience. Gustavus sent ahead a declaration of this his intention, entered with the German princes into the most definite treaties concerning the general national cause, at whose head he placed himself from free and noble magnanimity, defeated the armies of oppression, freed the lands from the burden of them and from the still more oppressive burden of the religious rights torn from them; his camp was a church, he and his army went into battle singing the most fervent religious hymns. His arm, victorious for the restoration of religion and of the rights [torn from] the German princes, did not give back to the Count Palatine his reconquered hereditary states, kept other lands in its power and other plans in its head, which his death did not let him carry out and which the subsequent course of the war let his chancellor fulfil only so far that the foreign power received at the peace Western Pomerania and a part of Further Pomerania,

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