In Germany, however, the English envoys had a better field, for in that disrupted land the case of the population, though resembling that of those who dwelt in the countries just enumerated, was not identical. Ever since France had asserted the doctrine that her natural frontier was the Rhine, the simplest answer to the question of how the temporal princes of the Germanic body were to be indemnified for the territories she was seizing had evidently been found in recurring to Richelieu's policy at the close of the Thirty Years' War, namely, the secularization of bishoprics, and their incorporation with dynastic states. In the Congress of Rastadt, Austria had grudgingly admitted this as a guiding principle, disastrous as it was to her supremacy in the empire--a supremacy based on the support of the ecclesiastical rulers, who, being bound to no dynasty, naturally rallied about the great Roman Catholic power, in opposition to Prussia, her Protestant rival. So far, therefore, Roman Catholicism in Germany had been in the main conservative, and English diplomatists found ample room for the display of their ingenuity in offsetting religious factions, as well as political cliques and dynastic interests, one against the other.
But after the Concordat Bonaparte's position was so utterly changed that all the liberal Roman Catholics in Germany, and a large proportion of the rest, had little to choose between France and Austria. He was therefore able to carry out in Germany the excellent policy of entire reconstruction which he had pursued in Italy--a policy which had had the sanction of French royalism and of French republicanism. As a protector of the Church he could go only so far in the wholesome process as he was able to make the world believe to be necessary. Insisting, with this in view, that both the great German powers should be separated from the Rhine by a line of little states, he began to carve lands and transfer communities without the slightest regard to their will. Nothing proves more conclusively how entirely the balance of power had been destroyed, or how the old conceptions of international relations were crushed, than the position of the Germanic body and the disposition Bonaparte made of it. The petty states fell suppliant at Talleyrand's feet, and the venal minister spared those which paid the most; the others disappeared from the map without any protest except from their own deposed princes. Scores of the corrupt little courts which had disgraced the German name died without any to mourn their demise, and proud imperial cities were forced to bow before the semi-feudal dynasties. The process wrought havoc in the local jealousies which had prevented in Germany that wholesome national development already advanced among other European peoples.