[p. 579]
|579| Saxony has no vote at all. Such small imperial cities as still remain would have to let the districts lying round about them share in the quality of sending a deputy.
In any case one does not know what the bench of cities is supposed to signify. There are three colleges in the Imperial Diet, but the majority of votes does not decide; if the electoral and the princely college do not agree, the matter is left lying, and the college of cities gives no casting vote.
The whole change would be that the lands would now hand over directly to emperor and Empire the money which they grant directly to the princes and contribute only indirectly to emperor and Empire.
The emperor would again be placed at the head of the German Empire.
It would be the question whether the knightly cantons would send deputies into the council of princes or into the college of cities. They would grant their charitative subsidies in common with the others, and as lords of dominions they would necessarily have to be associated with the princely college.
It would [further] be the question whether the princes would resolve to furnish a contribution in common out of their domains and other territorial revenues, or whether each would defray his regiment or his guard in part from these. Generally it would be open to each, over and above the general part that would be given to it by the whole, to contribute to the splendour of this regiment as much of his own as he pleased. In the former case, if the princes granted and handed over contributions from the domains to a common point, the knights would have to be associated with them; as indeed, in any event, originally true nobility, i.e. lords of dominions over immediate knightly estates, belonged wholly in the category of the princes and in their origin were not different from them.
The question would also arise whether in the electoral
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