r the principles of feodal tenure and succession,
under imperial constitutions, grants and concessions of sovereigns,
family compacts, and public treaties, made under the sanction, and some
of them guarantied by the sovereign powers of other nations, and
particularly the old government of France, the author and natural
support of the Treaty of Westphalia.

[Sidenote: Ecclesiastical state.]

In short, the Germanic body is a vast mass of heterogeneous states, held
together by that heterogeneous body of old principles which formed the
public law positive and doctrinal. The modern laws and liberties, which
the new power in France proposes to introduce into Germany, and to
support with all its force of intrigue and of arms, is of a very
different nature, utterly irreconcilable with the first, and indeed
fundamentally the reverse of it: I mean the _rights and liberties of the
man_, the _droit de l'homme_. That this doctrine has made an amazing
progress in Germany there cannot be a shadow of doubt. They are infected
by it along the whole course of the Rhine, the Maese, the Moselle, and
in the greater part of Suabia and Franconia. It is particularly
prevalent amongst all the lower people, churchmen and laity, in the
dominions of the Ecclesiastical Electors. It is not easy to find or to
conceive governments more mild and indulgent than these Church
sovereignties; but good government is as nothing, when the rights of
man take possession of the mind. Indeed, the loose rein held over the
people in these provinces must be considered as one cause of the
facility with which they lend themselves to any schemes of innovation,
by inducing them to think lightly of their governments, and to judge of
grievances, not by feeling, but by imagination.

[Sidenote: Balance of Germany.]

It is in these Electorates that the first impressions of France are
likely to be made; and if they succeed, it is over with the Germanic
body, as it stands at present. A great revolution is preparing in
Germany, and a revolution, in my opinion, likely to be more decisive
upon the general fate of nations than that of France itself,--other than
as in France is to be found the first source of all the principles which
are in any way likely to distinguish the troubles and convulsions of our
age. If Europe does not conceive the independence and the equilibrium of
the Empire to be in the very essence of the system of balanced power in
Europe, and if the scheme of pub