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Rh victory. In Germany the Peace of Westphalia placed the Fronde of the greater princes in an English relation towards the Emperor and in the French relation towards the lesser Fronde of the local princes. In the Empire as such, the Estates ruled; in its provinces, the Dynasty. Thenceforth the Imperial dignity, like the English kingship, was a name, surrounded by relics of Spanish stateliness dating from the early Baroque; while the individual princes, like the leading families of the English aristocracy, succumbed to the model of Paris and their duodecimo absolutism was, politically and socially, bound in the Versailles style. So, in this field and in that, the decision fell in favour of the Bourbons and against the Habsburgs, a decision already visible to all men in the Peace of the Pyrenees of 1659.

With this epochal turn the State, which as a possibility is inherent in every Culture, was actualized and attained to such a height of "condition" as could neither be surpassed nor for long maintained. Already there is a quiet breath of autumn in the air when Frederick the Great is entertaining at Sans Souci. These are the years too, in which the great special arts attain to their last, most refined, and most intellectual maturity — side by side with the fine orators of the Athenian Agora there are Zeuxis and Praxiteles, side by side with the filigree of Cabinet-diplomacy the music of Bach and Mozart.

This cabinet-politics has itself become a high art, an artistic satisfaction to all who have a finger in it, marvellous in its subtlety and elegance, courtly, refined, working mysteriously at great distances — for already Russia, the North American colonies, even the Indian states are put into play in order by the mere weight of surprising combinations to bring about decisions at quite other points on the globe. It is a game with strict rules, a game of intercepted letters and secret confidants, of alliances and congresses within a system of governments which even then was called (with deep meaning) the "concert" of the powers — full of noblesse and esprit, to use the phrases of the period, a mode of keeping history "in form" never and nowhere else imagined, or even imaginable.

In the Western world, whose sphere of influence is already almost the sphere itself, the period of the absolutist State covers scarcely a century and a half — from 1660, when Bourbon triumphed over Habsburg in the Peace of the Pyrenees and the Stuarts returned to England, to the Coalition Wars directed against the French Revolution, in which London triumphed over Paris, or, if one prefers it so, over that Congress of Vienna in which the old diplomacy, that of blood and not money, gave the world its grand farewell performance. Corresponding periods are the Age of Pericles between the First and the Second Tyrannis, and the Tshun-tsiu, "Spring and Autumn," as the Chinese call the time, between the Protectors and the "Contending States."

In this last phase of dignified politics with forms traditional but not popular, familiar but not smiled at, the culminating points are marked by the extinction