[p. 527]
|527| which otherwise is more important in politics than family and private rights; Naples and Sicily have been separated from Spain, the right of this family to them has been recognised, and likewise Tuscany has been kept separate from the imperial house.
Just as the old Roman Empire was destroyed by northern barbarians, so too the principle of destruction of the Roman-German Empire came from the north. Denmark, Sweden, England and above all Prussia are the foreign powers to which their status as estates of the Empire gives at once a centre17) separate from the German Empire and at once a constitutional influence in its affairs.
17) Editors: Mollat reads “interest”
Denmark played in this respect only a transient and brief role in the first years of the Thirty Years’ War.
The Peace of Westphalia in general consolidated the principle of what was then called German freedom, namely the dissolution of the Empire into independent states, diminished the multitude of such independent states, the only remaining possibility of a preponderance of the whole over the parts, and through their fusion into larger states strengthened the separation and conceded to foreign powers a rightful interference in the internal affairs, partly precisely by conceding to them lands of the Empire, partly by making them guarantors of the constitution.
At all times the measure by which one party in a state fighting within itself calls a foreign power to its aid has been held to be the greatest hostility and, if where the state dissolves there could still be any question of punishment, the greatest crime. In the deepest laceration of a state by internal wars, in this most terrible of all evils, there still prevails, in all the hatred
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