The German Constitution

[p. 452]

|452| foresight for the future; with pain Germany had to see that [the hope of] stopping up the source of the evils, of an essential improvement of the defects of the German constitution of the state, [vanished].²⁾

2) Editors: The text of this paragraph can only be inferred. In the first version it read:
“So many German patriots asked themselves, and the sad certainty of seeing that no higher purposes are conceived or pursued has filled them with pain and has almost entirely torn from them the hope [of] stopping up the source of all evil, [of] an essential improvement of the defects of the constitution of the state.”
The next paragraph was deleted – presumably already at the time of the writing in 1799:
“The following pages are the voice of a mind that unwillingly takes leave of its hope of seeing the German state raised up out of its insignificance, and that, before the final parting from its hopes, wished once more to recall vividly its ever weaker wishes and once more to enjoy in image its weak faith in their fulfilment.”

³⁾Apart from the despotisms, i.e. the states without a constitution, no country, as a whole, as a state, has a more wretched constitution than the German Empire; this has become a fairly general conviction; and the war, ended by the continuing peace negotiations, has given everyone the liveliest feeling of it, or rather it has now become clearer that Germany is no longer a state at all. Lecture-room statisticians, whose official duty it was to classify the constitutions of states and to bring them into the classes of monarchy, aristocracy etc. laid down by Aristotle, never knew how to get along with the German Empire; Voltaire called its constitution outright an anarchy; this is the best name, if Germany is regarded as a state; but now even this name no longer holds, because one can no longer regard Germany as a state.

3) In the margin: Germany no longer a state

The edifice of the German constitution of the state is the work of past centuries; it is not borne by the life

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