This feeling, absurd as it is, has been greatly favoured and fostered by the infinitesimal division of Germany at the Treaty of Vienna, and the maintenance as sovereignties of small states, which ought long ago to have been remorselessly absorbed. By that settlement Germany was declared to consist of no less than thirty-eight separate and independent states, with no other tie of union than an annual diet at Frankfort. Previous to the Revolutionary wars, there were actually about three hundred sovereign rulers in Germany, each of whom might have worn a crown, if he could only have found money enough to buy one. This was a miserable farce and a caricature, and it could not possibly last. The King of Man was a powerful potentate in comparison with some of these autocrats; and if there had been a royal house of Benbecula, the crown-prince of that insular Eden would have been a proper match for the daughter of their sublime Highnesses of Fugger-Kirchberg-Weisenborn, or Salm-Reifferscheid-Krautheim. The French invasion blew away a crowd of these little sovereigns, like mites from the surface of a cheese; but, very unfortunately, a tithe of them were permitted to clamber back. Some of the larger German states thought to fortify their position, and to obtain an ascendency in the Diet, by maintaining several of the minor principalities intact, and, in return, commanding their votes. Hence the retention as sovereign princedoms of the three Anhalts, the two Schwartzbergs, the two Hohenzollerns, the two houses of Reuss, the two Lippes, Waldeck, Lichtenstein, and Homburg--territories, the outlines of which you can hardly discover on an ordinary map of Europe, or even on one of Germany. These are the instances which we think the most objectionable and absurd, but the case of several others is not much better. For example, there are four sovereign Saxe Duchies, besides the kingdom of Saxony proper. Thirty-eight, then, were preserved by the Congress of Vienna, whereas, for the sake of stability, there should not have been more than five. The remaining German states might have been absorbed, as were many more, into Austria, Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, and Hanover; and, in this way, power would have been consolidated, a balance preserved, and entire centralisation avoided. Instead of which, for more than thirty years there has been a constellation of princes and of petty courts throughout Germany, to its infinite detriment and discredit. Magnificent Lichtenstein, with a territory of two square miles, and about five thousand subjects, takes rank with imperial Austria; and Henry, styling himself the twenty-second of Reuss-Lobenstein and Ebersdorf, has as good a patrimonial sceptre as Frederick-William of Prussia. Out of all this, what could arise save endless wrangling and confusion?