[p. 589]
|589| as has been shown above, not in itself prevent Germany from being a state, if only, in so far as financial arrangements are necessary in more recent times for common defence by a military power, [such] were present.
The chamber taxes, which are paid by the estates for the maintenance of the Imperial Chamber Court, actually make up quite alone the ordinary finances of Germany; they are accordingly very simple, and no Pitt is required to direct them; even about these chamber instalments it is complained that they often come in badly, Brandenburg does not pay the increase which was decreed several years ago, etc. The regular costs of the other supreme court of the Empire, the Imperial Aulic Council, are in any case borne by the emperor, and in more recent times a beginning has been made of founding a fund for this by the sale of escheated fiefs of the Empire. – The administration of justice has in any case no immediate relation to state power, and to what extent this administration of justice relates at the same time also to the organization of state power, to the political relations, will be discussed afterwards. As little as two states whose monarchs formerly sometimes chose a third as arbiter for the settlement of their disputes, or in general had in the papal see a common court, were to be held for one state, just as little can what is called the justice of the Empire, and a financial arrangement that has reference to it, make Germany into one state.
According to the principle of the feudal constitution the contingents are paid and provisioned by the estates themselves; as regards the latter point, pressing need has caused many estates to relax the exercise of this right and to hit upon the advantageous expedient of making an agreement with the head of the Empire concerning common provisioning; thus smaller estates too have made no use of their right to put their soldiers into the field themselves and have settled with greater estates, which took care of putting up the quantum of military falling to the smaller estates. One sees, however, that if in this a dawn of a transformation of the contingents proper into sums of money, of a transition of the in a certain manner personal services into a modern financial arrangement and with it of a transference of the establishment and maintenance of the military power to the head of the Empire, shone through – that this whole relation has concerned only small estates and was a matter of passing accident.
For the costs of those sides of a modern war which are not satisfied by the furnishing of soldiers,
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