There were still numbers of Imperial Counts and Knights, as well as free cities, that had not been absorbed in 1803.  The survivors were now wiped out by Napoleon for the benefit of his Rhenish underlings, the spoliation being veiled under the term Mediatization.  The euphemism claims a brief explanation.  In old German law the nobles and cities that gained local independence by shaking off the control of the local potentate were termed immediate, because they owed allegiance directly to the Emperor, without any feudal intermediary:  if by mischance they fell under that hated control they were said to be mediatized.  This term was now applied to acts that subjected the knight, or city, not to feudal control, but to complete absorption by the king or prince of Napoleon’s creation.  Six Imperial or Free Cities survived the Secularizations, namely, the three Hanse towns, and Augsburg, Frankfurt, and Nuremberg.  The northern towns still held their ancient rights; but Augsburg and Nuremberg now fell to the King of Bavaria, and Frankfurt was bestowed by Napoleon on Dalberg, the Prince Primate of the Confederation.

German life began to lose much of the quaint diversity beloved of artists and poets; but it also gained much.  No longer did the Count of Limburg-Styrum parade his army of one colonel, six officers, and two privates in the valley of the Roehr:  he and his passed under the sway of Murat, and the lapse of these pigmy forces made a national army possible in the dim future.  No more did the Imperial lawyers at Wetzlar browse on evergreen lawsuits:  justice was administered after the concise methods of Napoleon.  The crops of the Swabian peasant were now comparatively safe from the deer of His Translucency of the castle hard by; for the spirit of the French Revolution breathed upon the old game laws and robbed them of their terrors.  And the German patriot of to-day must still confess that the first impulse for reform, however questionable its motives and brutal its application, came from the new Charlemagne.

NOTE TO THE FOURTH EDITION.—­In a volume of Essays entitled “Napoleonic Studies” (George Bell and Sons, 1904) I have treated somewhat fully the questions of Pitt’s Continental policy, and of Napoleon’s relations to the new thought of the age, in two Essays, entitled “Pitt’s Plans for the Settlement of Europe” and “Wordsworth, Schiller, Fichte, and the Idealist Revolt against Napoleon.”

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CHAPTER XXV

THE FALL OF PRUSSIA

We now turn to consider the influence which the founding of the Rhenish Confederation exerted on the international problems which were being discussed at Paris.  Having gained this diplomatic victory, Napoleon, it seems, might well afford to be lenient to Prussia, to the Czar, even to England.  Would he seize this opportunity, and soothe the fears of these Powers by a few timely concessions, or would he press them all the harder because the third of Germany was now under his control?  Here again he was at the parting of the ways.