[p. 475]
|475| non-uniformity of civil rights. Of the inequality of nature, of talents and of energy of soul – an inequality which produces a still more powerful difference than the inequality of civil relations – there is in any case no question. That a state should count among its subjects serfs, burghers, free noblemen and princes who in turn have subjects, and that the relations of these particular estates themselves as particular political members in turn exist not purely but in infinite modifications, hinders a multitude just as little from forming a public power as that the particular geographical members constitute provinces of various relations to the internal constitutional law.
With regard to actual civil laws and the administration of justice, neither would equality of laws and of legal procedure make Europe into a state, any more than equality of weights, measures and money, nor does their diversity sublate the unity of a state. If it did not already lie in the concept of the state that the closer determinations of the legal relations concerning the property of individuals against individuals do not touch it as public power, which has to determine only the relation of property to itself, the example of almost all European states could teach us, among which the most powerful of the true states have altogether non-uniform laws. France before the revolution had such a manifoldness of laws that, besides Roman law, which applied in many provinces, Burgundian, Breton etc. prevailed in others and almost every province, indeed almost every city, had a particular customary law, and a French writer said with truth that whoever travelled through France changed laws as often as post-horses.
No less does the circumstance lie outside the concept of the state, by what particular power or according to what proportion of share of the various estates or
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