nces was greater than ever. They divided the spoil, and there was
neither a nobility, nor a clergy, nor a national party to control or
resist them. In England, the royal power had, at that time, been brought
back to its proper limits, and it has thus been able to hold ever since,
with but short interruptions, its dignified position, supported by the
self-respect of a free and powerful nation. In France it assumed the most
enormous proportions during the long reign of Louis XIV., but its
appalling rise was followed, after a century, by a fall equally appalling,
and it has not yet regained its proper position in the political system of
that country. In Germany the royal power was less imposing, its
prerogatives being divided between the Emperor and a number of small but
almost independent vassals, remnants of that feudal system of the Middle
Ages which in France and England had been absorbed by the rise of national
monarchies. These small principalities explain the weakness of Germany in
her relation with foreign powers, and the instability of her political
constitution. Continental wars gave an excuse for keeping up large
standing armies, and these standing armies stood between the nation and
her sovereigns, and made any moral pressure of the one upon the other
impossible. The third estate could never gain that share in the government
which it had obtained, by its united action, in other countries; and no
form of government can be stable which is deprived of the support and the
active cooeperation of the middle classes. Constitutions have been granted
by enlightened sovereigns, such as Joseph II. and Frederick William IV.,
and barricades have been raised by the people at Vienna and at Berlin; but
both have failed to restore the political health of the country. There is
no longer a German nobility in the usual sense of the word. Its vigor was
exhausted when the powerful vassals of the empire became powerless
sovereigns with the titles of king or duke, while what remained of the
landed nobility became more reduced with every generation, owing to the
absence of the system of primogeniture. There is no longer a clergy as a
powerful body in the state. This was broken up at the time of the
Reformation; and it hardly had time to recover and to constitute itself on
a new basis, when the Thirty Years' War deprived it of all social
influence, and left it no alternative but to become a salaried class of
servants of the crown. No third