The German Constitution

[p. 477]

|477| city has the land tax, a private person the ground rent, an abbey the tithes, the nobleman the right of the chase, the commune the right of pasturage, and so on, and the various estates and bodies of every kind form particular relations with regard to levies — all such contingencies remain outside the concept of public power, for which, as the centre, only the determinate quantity is necessary, while the heterogeneous manner of the inflow, with regard to its origin, is a matter of indifference; just as, in general, the whole relation of the levy may lie outside of it [sc. the state] and the state nevertheless be very powerful, if either, as in the old feudal constitution, [the vassal] in cases of need provides by personal services at the same time for everything that he requires in the service he renders to the state, and for the rest the state has in domains the source of its revenues — or, as it may also be conceived, that in the latter way expenses could be defrayed altogether, where the state would not even as a monetary power, which it must be in more recent times, be a centre of levies, but [that] which it takes in as a levy would, according to the actual relation of most levies, stand on an equal footing of particular right with others who, in relation to the state, are private persons.

In our times there may be among the members just as loose a connection, or none at all, with regard to customs, culture and language; and the identity of these, this former pillar of the union of a people, is now to be counted among the contingencies, the character of which does not prevent a multitude from constituting a public power. Rome or Athens, and also any modern small state, could not subsist if the many languages that are current in the Russian Empire were spoken within its circuit, nor, likewise, if the customs among its citizens were as different as they are in that empire, or as they and culture already are in every capital of a great country. The diversity of language and of dialects,

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