The German Constitution

[p. 468]

|468| estate, every city, guild etc., everything that has rights or duties in relation to the state, has acquired them for itself, and the state, in such a curtailment of its power, has no other function than to confirm that its power was wrested from it, so that, when the state loses all power and yet the possession of individuals rests on the power of the state, the possession of those must necessarily be very unstable who have no other support than the state power, which equals zero.

The principles of German public law are therefore not to be derived from the concept of a state [in general] or the concept of a determinate constitution, a monarchy etc., and German constitutional law is not a science according to principles but an urbarium of the most various constitutional rights acquired in the manner of private law. Legislative, judicial, ecclesiastical, military power are, in the most lawless manner and in the most dissimilar portions, mingled, divided and combined, just as manifold as the property of private persons.

Through recesses of the Imperial Diet, peace treaties, electoral capitulations, house treaties, decisions of the imperial courts etc. the political property of each member of the German body politic is determined most carefully. The solicitude for it [has] extended with the most punctilious religiousness to each and every thing, and years of effort have been expended on seemingly insignificant things, e.g. titulature, order in walking and sitting, colour of certain furniture etc. From this side of the most exact determination of every circumstance relating to right, however trifling, the best organization must be ascribed to the German state. The German Empire is an empire, as the realm of nature is [in] its productions, unfathomable in the great and inexhaustible in the small, and it is this side which fills the initiated into the infinite details of the rights with that astonishment before the venerableness of the German body politic and with

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