[p. 548]
It is a thoroughly acknowledged and known principle that this particular interest is the most important consideration; it cannot be regarded as standing in contradiction with rights and duties or morality, but on the contrary, every single estate must, as a particular state, not sacrifice itself to a universal from which it has no help to expect, but the territorial prince, [the] magistrate of an imperial city, has the sacred duty laid upon him to care for his land and subjects.
[8. The Formation of National States]
Cross-reference: On the relation of states and on world history § 330 ff., especially § 349.
It is the Peace of Westphalia that fixed this relation of the independence of the parts. By themselves they would not have been capable of it; rather their league was scattered to dust and they themselves and their lands, without possibility of a resistance of their own, in the political and religious despot’s hand of Ferdinand.
Gustavus Adolphus’s expedition itself would, not with regard to his person – for he died at the height of fortune – but with regard to his nation, have been placed [in] a wholly equal class with the expeditions of his descendant Charles XII. The Swedish power likewise succumbed in Germany, had not Richelieu’s policy, which Mazarin carried out in the same sense, taken up and sustained its cause.
Richelieu was granted the rare good fortune of having been held to be their greatest benefactor both by that state to whose greatness he laid the true foundation, and by that at whose expense it happened.
France as a state and Germany as a state had both the same two principles of dissolution within them; in the one he destroyed them completely and thereby raised it to one of the most powerful states, in the other he gave them all power and thereby sublated its subsistence as a state. In both countries he brought to full maturity the principle on which they were inwardly founded: the principle of France
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