[p. 587]
|587| – which is all the more feasible since such foreign powers are at the same time fellow estates of the Empire, but, given the independence and peculiarity of their interests, really have only this name and so again draw new advantage from their inactivity. This protection granted is all the more unobjectionable because it originally concerns only a determinate object and so by its essence appears temporary, hence is not called protective lordship and is also not so named because in more recent times such names are avoided and each state is gladly left the title of an independent state, just as the French Republic too in its treaties with the Batavian and Cisalpine Republics did not call itself protectress; and if the articles of such treaties stipulate that it places armies in these states as garrisons and draws annual sums for this, which are not called protection money, yet the first article of such an agreement always contains the recognition of the independence of such a state.
Now if several great contingents have come together, the instability of their relations disturbs their common effectiveness. There is no free disposition over these corps of troops, such as is necessary for the certainty of the execution of plans of war, and the plan of a campaign, or perhaps of individual operations, requires for its enactment not so much orders to the troops as rather negotiations. It cannot fail that the calculation also enters whether a corps of one individual estate is used too much, others on the other hand spared, and equality of right violated. If the possibility that such a contingent may perhaps be withdrawn in the most important [moments] still comes into consideration, and the jealousy of the various corps, which regard themselves as different nations, then all these circumstances contribute to making an army of the Empire, even one considerable in number and in quality, unable to produce a proportionate effect.
The warlike weakness of Germany is therefore not [regarded as] a consequence of cowardice or of the military unfitness of its inhabitants; no one holds them either unwarlike or unacquainted with the skills which in more recent times contribute as much to victory as bravery. If on every occasion the contingents of the Empire have given the greatest proofs of courage and shown themselves worthy of their German name and of their ancestors, then the arrangement of the whole and the general separation are to blame for there being no blessing in those deeds and for the exertions and sacrifices of individual men and corps being lost fruitlessly.
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