[p. 469]
|469| that admiration for this system of the most thoroughly carried-out justice.
This justice, to maintain every part in its separation from the state, and the necessary claims of the state on its individual member stand in the most complete contradiction. The state requires a universal centre, a monarch and estates, in which the various powers, relations to foreign powers, military power, finances relating to these, etc. would be united, a centre which, for the direction, would also have the necessary power to assert itself and its decisions and to keep the individual parts in dependence on itself. Through right, on the other hand, nearly complete, or rather complete, independence is assured to the individual estates. If there are sides of independence that are not expressly and solemnly determined in electoral capitulations, recesses of the Imperial Diet etc., [then] they are sanctioned to them by practice, – a more important and more thoroughgoing ground of right than all the rest. The German edifice of the state is nothing other than the sum of the rights which the individual parts have withdrawn from the whole, and this justice, which watches carefully that no power remain to the state, is the essence of the constitution.
Let the unfortunate provinces, which perish in the helplessness of the state to which they belong, accuse its political condition, let the head of the Empire and the patriotic estates first hard pressed call upon the rest in vain for common cooperation, let Germany be plundered and insulted, – the scholar of public law will know how to show that all this is entirely in accord with the rights and the practice and that all misfortunes are trifles compared with the upholding of this justice. If the unfortunate manner in which the war has been conducted lies in the conduct of individual estates, of whom one furnished no contingent, very many
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