Economic expansion
and colonial enterprise, together with the consequent upbuilding of a
well-to-do middle class, were resigned to Spain, Portugal, Holland,
France, or England, without a protest from what had once been a proud
burgher class in Germany. This elimination of an influential
bourgeoisie was accompanied by a sorry impoverishment and oppression of
the peasantry. These native sons of the German soil had fondly hoped
for better things from the religious revolution and agrarian
insurrections of the sixteenth century; but they were doomed to failure
and disappointment. The peasantry were in a worse plight in the
eighteenth century in Germany than in any other country of western or
central Europe.
[Sidenote: The German Princes]
The princes alone knew how to profit by the national prostration.
Enriched by the confiscation of ecclesiastical property in the
sixteenth century and relieved of meddlesome interference on the part
of the emperor or the Diet, they utilized the decline of the middle
class and the dismal serfdom of the peasantry to exalt their personal
political power.
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