[p. 584]
|584| than horses. The courts can have judicial districts of very different extent; whether here a nobleman, there a city court is the first instance, whether the highest instances are different, whether one highest instance is set up for a whole state, is a matter of indifference.
Just as independent of the state or non-uniform can be the appointment to judicial posts, to the city magistracies, village mayors, other offices of administration. Arrangements which concern these circumstances are only relatively important for the state, within a certain limit indifferent to its chief purpose; but one and the same power is ready to support the divergent pronouncements of divergent laws and to wield its force.
Just [as little] does a multitude cease [thereby] to belong to a state because its parts pay different levies. This inequality again occurs in almost all European states. Not to speak of the fact that the natural inequality of contributions to the expenses of the state, which arises through inequality of wealth, so little dissolves the state that states in fact rest upon it, there is almost universally a non-uniformity already in regard to the different estates; nobility, clergy, the estate of burghers and of peasants nowhere contribute in equal proportion; just as great a difference occurs, apart from the estates, in regard to the different provinces that belong to a state; the enormous difference in this in France generally and, for example, especially in respect of salt is well known. (In some provinces the price of 
salt was under 6 sous, in others over 12 sous.) Just as little is unity necessary in regard to taxes on houses and on landed estates; how different are not the levies through servitudes attaching to the estate, then ground rents and so on. Just as little may there be a connection in which treasuries these levies flow, whether on a field a nobleman has the right of hunting, the city the land tax, an abbey the tithes – if only there is a centre whose power is held together by a confluence – even though quite unequal; it can also be thought that the power of the state, in so far as it needs money, is fed by no contributions at all from the individual owners – in the feudal constitution the case occurred where the state as such needed no money and was very powerful – or, if money is necessary to it, it is conceivable that it defrays the expenses of the state through domains and is not even a centre for the levies, but that these, in the most manifold manner, as well
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