picture of the deformities of this political monster. They either
fail to execute their commissions, or they do it with all the
devastation and carnage of civil war. Sometimes whole circles are
defaulters; and then they increase the mischief which they were
instituted to remedy.
We may form some judgment of this scheme of military coercion
from a sample given by Thuanus. In Donawerth, a free and imperial
city of the circle of Suabia, the Abb 300 de St. Croix enjoyed
certain immunities which had been reserved to him. In the exercise
of these, on some public occasions, outrages were committed on him
by the people of the city. The consequence was that the city was
put under the ban of the empire, and the Duke of Bavaria, though
director of another circle, obtained an appointment to enforce it.
He soon appeared before the city with a corps of ten thousand
troops, and finding it a fit occasion, as he had secretly intended
from the beginning, to revive an antiquated claim, on the pretext
that his ancestors had suffered the place to be dismembered from his
territory,1 he took possession of it in his own name, disarmed,
and punished the inhabitants, and reannexed the city to his domains.
It may be asked, perhaps, what has so long kept this disjointed
machine from falling entirely to pieces? The answer is obvious:
The weakness of most of the members, who are unwilling to expose
themselves to the mercy of foreign powers; the weakness of most of
the principal members, compared with the formidable powers all
around them; the vast weight and influence which the emperor
derives from his separate and heriditary dominions; and the
interest he feels in preserving a system with which his family pride
is connected, and which constitutes him the first prince in Europe;
--these causes support a feeble and precarious Union; whilst the
repellant quality, incident to the nature of sovereignty, and which