ights as a
political force disappeared; the free cities were reduced to four; and
such distinctions of caste as survived rapidly declined in political
importance. By an appreciable levelling of society the way was
prepared for co-ordinated national development, while by the
extinction of a variety of republican and aristocratic sovereignties
monarchy as a form of government acquired new powers of unification
and leadership.[276]

[Footnote 276: On Germany during the Napoleonic
period see Cambridge Modern History, IX., Chap. 11;
J. H. Rose, Life of Napoleon I., 2 vols. (new ed.,
New York, 1910), II., Chaps. 24-25; A. Fournier,
Napoleon I., a Biography, trans, by A. E. Adams, 2
vols, (New York, 1911), I., Chaps. 11-12; J. R.
Seeley, Life and Times of Stein; or Germany and
Prussia in the Napoleonic Age, 3 vols. (Cambridge,
1878); H. A. L. Fisher, Studies in Napoleonic
Statesmanship, Germany (Oxford, 1903).]

*203. The Congress of Vienna and the Confederation of 1815.*--The
collapse of the dominion of Napoleon was followed in Germany by rather
less of a return to earlier arrangements than might have been
expected. Indeed, it can hardly be said to have involved any such
return at all. The Confederation of the Rhine was dissolved, and both
the grand-duchy of Warsaw and the kingdom of Westphalia ceased, as
such, to be. But the Holy Roman Empire was not revived; the newly
acquired dignities of the sovereigns of Saxony, Bavaria, and other
states were perpetuated; despite the clamors of the mediatized
princes, the scores of German states which during the decade had been
swallowed up by their more powerful neighbors, or had been otherwise
blotted out, were not re-established; and--most important of all--the
social and economic changes by which the period had been given (p. 195)
distinction were, in large part, not undone.

As has been pointed out, the close of the Napoleonic period found
Germany entirely devoid of political unity, in both name and fact. By
the governments which were chiefly influential in the reconstruction
of Europe in 1814-1815, it was deemed expedient that there be
re-established some degree of German unity, though on the part of most
of them, both German and non-German, there was no desire that there be
called into