[p. 499]
This loss actually embraces two kinds: namely, besides the actual subjection of German lands to foreign supremacy and their complete severance from all rights and duties towards the Empire, it must be regarded as a loss for the state that so many lands, while they have remained in every hitherto legal and apparent relation towards Emperor and Empire, have nevertheless received princes who, in that they became or were members of the Empire, are at the same time monarchs of independent states. It is this circumstance which is apparently no loss, but apparently left everything as it was, yet has undermined the coherence of the state in its fundamental pillars, because these lands have thereby become independent of public power.
Without going back to older times, we give only a brief survey of how, from the Peace of Westphalia onwards, the impotence of Germany and its necessary fate in relation to foreign powers has manifested itself; naturally only its loss of lands in the peace settlements can be in question, for the damage through war is, by every account, immeasurable.
In the Peace of Westphalia there was lost not only all connection of the United Netherlands with the German Empire, but also of Switzerland, whose independence had long since taken place in practice but was now formally recognised — a loss not of possession but of claims, which is in itself not significant, but important to the German Empire, which has often shown that chimeras of claims and rights, lacking all reality, are held by it to be higher than an actual possession. — So too Germany now formally ceded to France the bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun, which it had already lost a century before. A real loss, however, for the Empire was the cession of the landgraviate of Alsace, namely so far as Austria had possessed it, and of the imperial city of Bisanz [Besançon] to Spain.
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