[p. 606]
|606| to defray himself; state revenues are wholly superfluous. In the most recent times the other extreme of a lack of finances has been seen, namely that every expense that a state office [requires], down to the office of village judge (juge de paix) and still further down, flows as levy first to the supreme public power and as expenditure from it back into the smallest branches of the public service. The supreme direction of the state over finances has become a mania, to tie everything required for the service of a public power however insignificant, in however small a compass, to the supreme power, to let no village provide for the pay of its beadle. This care of the state is superfluous and for that reason becomes harmful; when a power does not let a community do something that it can and will itself perform, which stands in no relation to the whole, this superfluous interference appears as a tyranny.
In the German Empire not only the immediate estates but also the provincial towns in principalities, even villages for the most part themselves provide [for] the finances that concern themselves, provide for the pay of their magistrates, courts etc., all under supreme supervision; and because [the] purpose of those expenditures is so restricted and [they] rest in any case on old tradition and are small, the state does not need to interfere in any other way, it being concerned only with the universal; should they hinder this universal, be too great and make the contribution for the state difficult, then the state would have to see to it.
Only those expenditures and receipts interest the state that concern its power with regard to the upholding of what the laws pronounce, and to security against foreign enemies.
As to that power for upholding the laws, provision is made for it in the individual estates by their own power; the general state usually has nothing to do with it, each estate becomes master over its criminals; not always over rebellion, and then one is compelled to address the neighbouring estates, and these (as in the Liège affair) then gladly lend a helping hand; more powerful estates (at that time Prussia) may indeed not want to be content to be mere executors of judicial rulings, but believe themselves important and judicious enough to proceed in it according to their understanding and good intention, that is, to play the matter out of the judicial into the political sphere; in the latter the matter might often be
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