[p. 591]
|591| ducat that was not applied to the Empire should at once run off like water, that such a wisher would be regarded by a multitude of honest citizens of the Empire as the greatest German patriot who ever existed, because in the first moment they would have only the feeling that they would have nothing to pay thereby, before the reflection that through such a wish not a farthing comes into the treasury of the Empire. Apart from this, earlier Imperial Diets on the contrary, in relation to the need of such a fund, designated no ideal sources but, without any individual estate having to sacrifice anything of its interest, true realities, actual lands, for defraying the expenses of the affairs of the Empire, like those huntsmen a real bear for the payment of their reckoning. For several hundred years ago a law was made that for the establishment of a fund of the Empire all those lands should be designated which have fallen into [the hands] of foreign nations, if the German Empire wins them back. Accordingly the loss of the left bank of the Rhine can be regarded from a more consoling side, namely as a possibility for the founding of such a fund.
Even if such thoughts, more thorough in their time, were not forgotten and the German character should be sanguine enough to set a hope on such hopes in the present political condition of Europe and Germany, they could still not come into consideration in the weighing of whether Germany possesses the kind of power that now belongs to the essence of a state, a money power.
30)Formerly there also often occurred a case in which individual estates had expenses and trouble for [the] general, namely in executions of declarations of outlawry or other decisions of the courts of the Empire; if they were actually set in motion, the costs fell upon the party defeated in right; naturally the party had to have been defeated not merely in right but also in war, for the army of execution of the Empire in the Seven Years’ War received no compensation for its trouble from the estate against which it was directed. – In earlier times there was a powerful spur to actually execute a declaration of outlawry: the executing party retained, without further right to it, as compensation for its expense the lands or a great part of the lands of the executed estate. In this way the Swiss came into the possession of the greater part of the original lands of the House of Habsburg, Bavaria into the possession of Donauwörth, etc.
30) In the margin: Costs of execution
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