[p. 485]
|485| according to the ephemeral energy to which a single genius has known how to force it up for a time.
We therefore distinguish, in a state, not only the necessary, which must lie in the hand of public power and be determined immediately by it, from that which, though absolutely necessary in the social union of a people, is contingent for public power as such, but also hold that people to be happy to whom the state leaves much free hand in the more subordinate general activity, and a public power to be infinitely strong which can be supported by the freer and unpedantised spirit of its people.
That in Germany, then, the unfree demand is not fulfilled to know laws, administration of justice, the imposition and collection of levies, and so on, language, customs, culture, religion, regulated and governed from one centre, but that in respect of these the most disparate manifoldness obtains — this would not prevent Germany from constituting a state, if it [were] organised otherwise than as a public power …
[II. History and Critique of the Constitution of the German Empire]
[1. Military Power]
Cross-reference: § 321–§ 329, on military service and the estate of bravery § 325 ff.
The propagation of this warlike talent itself proves that these hosts of armed men are not idle; for centuries no significant war has been waged among the European powers in which German valour has not, if not laurels, always won honour, in which streams of German blood have not flowed.
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