[p. 498]
|498| of remaining safe and undisturbed. As little as these paintings can raise objections against the present owners of their manors, so little have the claims of the German Empire in public law ever caused any minister apprehension of expecting a contradiction from him; both, the nobleman and the teacher of public law, can quietly abandon themselves to their innocent and harmless amusements.
If the teachers of public law still amuse themselves with setting out the claims of the Holy Roman-German Empire to Hungary, Poland, Prussia, Naples, and so on, it is to be remarked, on the political unimportance of such rights, that they concern not so much the German Empire as such, but rather the Roman imperial dignity, the head of Christendom and the lord of the world, and [that] the Roman Emperor and King in Germany, as his title declared, were separate in essence. The German Empire could have neither the interest, nor the will, nor later the strength to maintain what could be reckoned to belong to the supremacy of the Emperor, and such an unnatural union of lands, which their geographical situation as well as the individuality of the peoples separated — the less so since it neither would nor could preserve even those lands which were integral parts of itself.
Of the connection with the Lombard kingdom traces have been preserved even to the most recent times, but it cannot be regarded as an essential part of the German kingdom proper, the less so since it was a kingdom of its own, and the membership of the estates of the Empire which fell to some of its states had long since lost its force.
But in regard to the lands essentially belonging to the German Empire and possessing and exercising membership of the estates of the Empire, almost every war of the Empire has ended with the loss of some of them.
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