[p. 565]
|565| of the debts, the part that stood under French rule refused parity and equal participation, because it believed it would lose; this popular opinion may be unfounded, yet one always sees in general from it the judgement of the people.
[Brandenburg thus has the advantage that it]25) either has the more powerful as friends or, because it otherwise stands in no relations of alliance and protection, treats them as enemies, and in the case of a treaty of guarantee can cancel it at once, because it is only something determinate and particular like every political treaty and, according to the essence of political treaties, its cancellation is not faithlessness, which this war has taught most of all, in which so many treaties have been cancelled, tied again and cancelled again. The connections of Austria with the estates, on the contrary, seem [not] to stand in the rank of ordinary political treaties, but if it placed itself in the ordinary relation towards an estate of the Empire, as Prussia can, all the estates [would] feel themselves attacked in it. With Prussia it seems natural, as well as with France, etc.
25) Editors: supplied after Lasson
Through its power and through the appearance of this in the cases cited above, Prussia has stepped out of equal rank with the other estates. The pure interest of their political independence they can find only in themselves, and an association of them, a true league of estates, would be conceivable in this respect; but only conceivable, for in part the estates are themselves again so unequal among one another in power that they are incapable of a true equal union.
An abbey, imperial city, immediate nobility can fear much less to become the object of the lust for aggrandisement of the Austrian monarchy than of a less great power. The Prussian power, notwithstanding that it is a great monarchy, stands, in regard to this capacity of causing apprehensions
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