[p. 488]
|488| earnest and incapable of the comic, the farces of the wars of the Empire are forgotten, which are performed with all possible outward earnestness but a genuine inward ridiculousness.
While the organisation of the army of the Empire, with all its consequences, has not improved at all, the feeling of the misfortune and the disgrace of Germany brought about by it has diminished the general mania for mocking at it, and only because in the last war much in regard to it, for example the victualling, was done contrary to right and constitution, could these troops be of some use.
Still more disadvantageous than all these circumstances of the condition of an army of the Empire is the fact that none is ever actually brought together; and in this the dissolution of Germany into independent states shows itself most visibly.
According to the theory of the fundamental laws the army of the Empire could be a formidable army, but the practice, this mighty principle of German public law, shows something quite different. If one sees, only too often, an enormous multitude of German soldiers in the field, it goes without saying that they are afoot not as an army of the Empire for the defence of Germany but for the lacerating of its entrails. What is called the German constitution is not only unable to prevent such wars, but rather makes them lawful and in accordance with right.
All the more inconsiderable is the German army when it is called out for the protection of Germany; for although the fivefold contingents of Brandenburg, Saxony, Hanover, Bavaria, Hesse already form armies in themselves, and united are a formidable army, and would make the clumsiness of the smaller contingents united with them disappear, they depend on something quite other than the laws of Germany, and their co-operation in
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