*213. Federal Character of the Empire.*--The political system of Germany to-day is the product of centuries of particularistic statecraft, capped, in 1871, by a partial centralization of sovereign organs and powers. The Empire is composed of twenty-five states: the four kingdoms of Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Wuerttemberg; the six grand-duchies of Baden, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Saxe-Weimar, Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and Oldenburg; the five duchies of Brunswick, Saxe-Meiningen, Saxe-Altenburg, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and Anhalt; the seven (p. 204) principalities of Schwarzburg-Sonderhausen, Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Waldeck, Reuss Aelterer Linie, Reuss Juengerer Linie, Lippe, and Schaumburg-Lippe; and the three free cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Luebeck. These states vary in size from Prussia, with 134,616 square miles, to Bremen, with 99; and in population, from Prussia, with 40,163,333, to Schaumburg-Lippe, with 46,650. There is, in addition, the _Reichsland_, or Imperial domain, of Alsace-Lorraine, whose status until 1911 was that of a purely dependent territory, but which by act of the year mentioned was elevated to a condition of quasi-statehood.[284] [Footnote 284: See p. 285.] Prior to the formation in 1867, of the North German Confederation, each of the twenty-five states was sovereign and essentially independent. Each had its own governmental establishment, and in many instances the existing political system was of considerable antiquity. With the organization of the _Bund_, those states which were identified with the federation yielded their independence, and presumably their sovereignty; and with the establishment of the Empire, all gave up whatever claim they as yet maintained to absolute autonomy. Both the _Bund_ and the Empire were creations, strictly speaking, of the states, not of the people; and, to this day, as one writer has put it, the Empire is "not a juristic person composed of fifty-six million members, but of twenty-five members."[285] At the same time, it is not what the old Confederation of 1815 was, i.e., a league of princes. It is a state established by, and composed of, states.[286] [Footnote 285: P. Laband, Das Staatsrecht des deutschen Reiches, I., 91.]