[p. 482]
|482| wish to remark something upon it. What is first striking in it is that, according to such dry, abstract determinations as the two cited, the electors otherwise appear in no association and relation to civil order and to the organisation of the whole of the state. The citizens appear as isolated atoms and the electoral assemblies as unordered, inorganic aggregates, the people in general dissolved into a heap, – a shape in which the commonwealth, where it undertakes an action, should never show itself; it is the most unworthy of it and the most contradictory to its concept of being a spiritual order. For age, and likewise property, are qualities which concern merely the individual for himself, not attributes which make up his standing in civil order. Such a standing he has only by virtue of an office, an estate, a civilly recognised skill in a trade and entitlement according to it, mastership, title and so on. – The popular conception is so familiar with such standing that one says of a man only then that he is something when he has obtained an office, mastership, or otherwise admission in a determinate civil sphere; of one, on the contrary, who is only 25 years old and the owner of a landed property [which] yields him 200 Fl. and more annually, one says, he is nothing. If a constitution nevertheless makes him into something, into an elector, it grants him a high political right, without any connection with the other civil existences, and brings about for one of the most important affairs a condition which is connected more with the democratic, indeed even anarchic, principle of isolation than with the principle of an organic order.
The great beginnings of inner rightful relations in Germany, by which the formal formation of the state was prepared, are to be sought in history where, after the old royal governmental power had sunk in the Middle Ages and the whole had dissolved into atoms, now
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