[p. 497]
|497| ancestral possessions, Bavaria into possession of Donauwörth, and so on.
A multitude which, through this dissolution of the military power and lack of finances, has not known how to form a public power, is incapable of defending its [sc. the people’s] independence against foreign enemies. It must necessarily see it, if not all at once, yet little by little, go to ruin, be exposed in war to all plundering and devastation, must necessarily bear the main costs of it for friend and foe, must lose provinces to foreign powers, and, with public power over the individual members annihilated and suzerainty over the vassals lost, embrace within itself nothing but sovereign states, which as such behave towards one another according to power and cunning, of which the stronger expand and the weaker are swallowed up, and the more considerable are yet again powerless against a great power.
[3. The Territory of the Empire]
The lands which the German Empire has lost in the course of several centuries make up a long and sad list. The teachers of public law, partly because the laws of the constitution and of the organisation of public power have altogether come to nothing [and] give little or nothing to treat of, must keep to the description of the signs that have become empty and meaningless, as insignia of what was, and of claims; partly these claims bring with them precisely the consoling emotion with which an impoverished nobleman preserves the last remains of his vanished ancestors — a consolation which has the advantage
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