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But a moment later he recognized who it was, and, with a determined effort at gaiety, exclaimed, stretching out his long dry hand towards him "Ah, Abellino! 'tis you, eh? We fancied you had mediatized yourself in India. Come and sit down by me. Have you brought back with you some of those famous pastilles which you mentioned in your genial letters?"
For in very different ways she was really loved by Lushington and by Logotheti; and since she had been famous she had made the acquaintance of a good many very high and imposing personages, whose names are to be found in the first and second part of the Almanack de Gotha, in the Olympian circle of the reigning or the supernal regions of the Serene Mediatized, far above the common herd of dukes and princes; they had offered her a share in the overflowing abundance of their admirative protection; and then had seemed surprised, if not deeply moved, by the independence she showed in declining their intimacy.
The actual amount of dispossession was no doubt greatest in the higher ranks; the smaller owners may to a large extent have remained in a mediatized position on their estates; but even Domesday, with all its fulness and accuracy, cannot be supposed to enumerate all the changes of the twenty eventful years that followed the battle of Hastings.
"Because in Saxe-Kesselberg, as in all other German states, when a prince of the reigning house marries outside of the mediatized nobility he thereby forfeits his right of succession. It has been done any number of times. Why, don't you see, Mr. Vanderhoffen? Conceding you ever do such a thing, your cousin Augustus would become at once the legal heir. So you must marry.
The old Wurtemberg party alone could naturally take their footing upon their ancient rights, but the new Wurtemberg party, the mediatized princes of the empire, the counts and barons of the empire, and the imperial free towns, nay, even the Agnati of the reigning house, all of whom had suffered more or less under Napoleon's iron rule, ranged themselves on their side.
The privileges of the mediatized princes consist of exemption from conscription, the enjoyment of the Principle called "equality of birth," which prevents the burgher wife of a noble acquiring her husband's rank, and the right to have their own "house law" for the regulation of family disputes and family affairs generally.
"A State ought never to accept, and still less request, of another State, a service for which it is unable to offer in return a strict reciprocity; else by accepting such favour she loses the flower of her own independence a State accepting such a favour becomes a mediatized State: it makes an act of submission to the will of the State which takes the charge of its defence; this State becomes a protector, and to be dependent upon a protector is insupportable."
Instead of shaking a "mailed fist" at the world, young William of Hohenzollern might have been a mediatized princelet on the lookout for an American heiress; there might never have been a Leipzig or a Waterloo, as there certainly would not have been a Sedan, and the heirs of Napoleon might now have been ruling over an empire covering all Central Europe, from the Tiber to the Baltic.
In old German law the nobles and cities that gained local independence by shaking off the control of the local potentate were termed immediate, because they owed allegiance directly to the Emperor, without any feudal intermediary: if by mischance they fell under that hated control they were said to be mediatized.
In the course of our first long official interview with the General, he informed us that we were "an injection into an otherwise normal situation." He added that we had already mediatized the volume of work that flowed over his desk. At the moment none of us were quite sure what he meant, but we found the word in the dictionary.
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