[p. 500]
These lands went out of all connection with Germany, but several more than these remained, to be sure, in their legal and theoretical dependence, yet the fact that their princes were at the same time foreign monarchs laid the ground for their real separation in practice. To Sweden, namely, came Hither Pomerania and a part of Further Pomerania, the archbishopric of Bremen and the bishopric of Verden and the city of Wismar. To the Margrave of Brandenburg, Duke and afterwards King of Prussia, came the archbishopric of Magdeburg, the bishoprics of Halberstadt, Kammin and Minden.
Had the prince of Brandenburg not at the same time been a sovereign, this diminution of the number of German estates and their fusion into one mass would have produced only a slightly different effect, namely to form a state power which could now refuse subjection to German public power and offer it resistance, which the same, distributed among several, could not do.
Besides this diminution mentioned, several particular estates also ceased to exist, Schwerin, Ratzeburg, and so on.
Equally destructive for the German state was the circumstance that the German Empire, after foreign powers, both by force and when called in, had meddled in the affairs of Germany and laid it waste from one end to the other, and more or less dictated the peace, transferred to them in this peace the guarantee over its constitution and internal relations, and thereby acknowledged its incapacity to maintain itself as a state and its constitution, just as it abandoned its internal affairs to the interest of foreigners.
Other internal weakenings [were] the granting of privileges of appeal to several lands, in part also the permission of the choice of the court of the Empire before which the defendant wished to be sued, in that the defendant can by delaying the choice delay the course of the suit all the more; still more than all this the establishment of the
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