[p. 491]
|491| which in more recent times bravery may not lack for victory, and if on every occasion the contingents of the Empire give the greatest proofs of their courage and military self-sacrifice and show themselves worthy of the ancient military glory of the Germans and their ancestors, then it is the arrangement of the whole and the general dissolution which cause the exertions and sacrifices of the individual men and corps to be lost fruitlessly and lay a curse upon them which, however well they may strive, ruins all effect and consequences and puts them on a level with a ploughman who would sow the sea or plough the rock.
[2. Finances]
Cross-reference: On the levy to the state § 299, on the relation of resources and duty § 184 ff.
In the same case in which German public power finds itself with the military power, it finds itself with the finances, which, after the European states have more or less departed from the feudal constitution, have become an essential part of the power which must be found immediately in the hands of the supreme public power.
To the extreme of the arrangement of finance according to which every expenditure that a public office, down to the commonest village judge, catchpoll and lower still, or any public need limited to a village, requires, as well as every kind of revenue, flows up first as a levy to the supreme public power, and as state expenditure flows down again to the smallest branches of public activity, through all the intermediate links of laws, decrees, accountings and officials, of which no college is in anything a supreme instance — to this extreme the German lack of finance forms the other.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.