Iscariot, Austria that of Pontius Pilate, the Congress itself being the chief priests and Pharisees assembling that they may take the Holy Roman Empire by craft, while the army of the Empire figures as the "multitude who smote upon their breasts and departed." In the utter absence of any German pride or patriotism the French envoys not only obtained the territory that they required, but successfully embroiled the two leading Powers with one another, and accustomed the minor States to look to France for their own promotion at the cost of their neighbours. The contradictory pledges which the French Government had given to Austria and to Prussia caused it no embarrassment. To deceive one of the two powers was to win the gratitude of the other; and the Directory determined to fulfil its engagement to Prussia at the expense of the bishoprics, and to ignore what it had promised to Austria at the expense of Bavaria. [Rhenish Provinces.] [Ecclesiastical States suppressed.] A momentary difficulty arose upon the opening of the Congress, when it appeared that, misled by the Emperor's protestations, the Diet had only empowered its Committee to treat upon the basis of the integrity of the Empire (Dec. 9). The French declined to negotiate until the Committee had procured full powers: and the prospects of the integrity of the Empire were made clear enough a few days later by the entry of the French into Mainz, and the formal organisation of the Rhenish Provinces as four French Departments. In due course a decree of the Diet arrived, empowering the Committee to negotiate at their discretion: and for some weeks after the inhabitants of the Rhenish Provinces had been subjected to the laws, the magistracy, and the taxation of France, the Committee deliberated upon the proposal for their cession with as much minuteness and as much impartiality as if it had been a point of speculative philosophy. At length the French put an end to the tedious trifling, and proceeded to the question of compensation for the dispossessed lay Princes. This they proposed to effect by means of the disestablishment, or secularisation, of ecclesiastical States in the interior of Germany. Prussia eagerly supported the French proposal, both with a view to the annexation of the great Bishopric of Münster, and from ancient hostility to the ecclesiastical States as instruments and allies of Catholic Austria. The Emperor opposed the destruction of his faithful dependents; the ecclesiastical princes themselves raised a bitter outcry, and demonstrated that the fall of their order would unloose the keystone of the political system of Europe; but they found few friends. If Prussia coveted the great spoils of Münster, the minor sovereigns, as a rule, wore just as eager for the convents and abbeys that broke the continuity of their own territories: only the feeblest of all the members of the Empire, the counts, the knights, and the cities,