The German Constitution

[p. 594]

4.

d. political principle, in order to let the great feel their dependence

II. Even if a definitive judgement has followed, execution is lacking; from this side anarchy is visible, no public power.

III. The sovereign rights of the princes indeed do not extend to war and peace – in more recent times also, according to practice – but to alliances with foreign powers; thereby the rights of the estates [become] objects of politics, in any case and by right. Just this tendency to independence makes all improvement impossible; well-founded pretext – bad justice, in order to withdraw from it; that tendency may not remove the pretext; the Visit. under Joseph II. The estates, attacked, attacked the emperor and Mainz, both therefore let it go; both became weary of it, because their indeterminate rights could lose through determination. A better justice would be fearful for the estates of the Empire, it makes void their politics, the sending of foreign powers by envoys, acquisition through political negotiations, the two stand in complete contradiction; what is a matter of right cannot be a matter of power, of influence etc. The estates indeed do not have the right of war with one another, but indirectly through alliances, the city of Münster thus brought under the bishopric.

IV. A very important circumstance, however, is the difference that obtains between public power and object of right; an object of right is a private property; public power cannot be private property; it flows from the state; there is no right to it save that of the state; its extent, the possession of it depends on the state, valid only in relation to it; no object of judicial treatment. Acquisition of private property is a matter of chance, of arbitrary will. Public power must stand in the closest connection with the whole; the state is the supreme master – even if only in one respect – of the defence of the laws, and against foreign parts however – yet in this, all right proceeds from it, it has to decide, not chance, not documents, and other titles of right. […]

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