[p. 607]
|607| better arranged, if the power is judicious and fair, especially in the dispute between subjects and princes, where usually Iliacos intra [etc.] and the judge has to pronounce only according to cold right; but with that the whole standpoint of an executor, the whole principle of the constitution is displaced, the foundation pillar of the bond of the state shattered, or rather it is only revealed on such occasions that it was already shattered beforehand. In such cases, therefore, where the laws are to be exercised only against private persons, they cannot be exercised by the state but by the estate; at a pinch probably also in rebellions, because the interest of the princes in them is common.
Quite otherwise is it when the pronouncements of the laws are to be upheld against estates; in this respect no sufficient state power is organised; on the contrary the laws are so constituted that the laws cannot be upheld; an insignificant estate must indeed crawl to the cross before a significant one, and that probably also in the case when not the laws but only the claims of the powerful one have spoken; but where would be the state power that would uphold the laws against the powerful estate, the executive power that would put into actuality against a powerful one the rights of the weaker as recognised by the judge?
Execution ordinance.
What do the proposals run for remedying these evils; to enforce execution against a prince who has over 200 000 men under his command?
Through the fact that the contingents are paid and fed by the estates themselves, military affairs become wholly independent of a supreme power; if they had only to deliver the men, the state would be independent of their negligence. For it could provide itself with men.
But thus, with regard to external defence, a supreme power in Germany is a) neither according to right b) nor according to practice. What express right still left to the state, the famous, all-powerful principle of practice has abolished.
C. One should have thought the estates’ own advantage would have moved them to hold Germany together as a state, since the subsistence of each single one rests wholly on the preservation of the whole as a united one. But against the state the natural reaction to separate oneself sets in; as with levies generally. All wish and demand administration of justice and government, all find levies necessary, all demand [them],
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