[p. 493]
According to the principle of the feudal constitution the contingents are paid by the estates themselves and provided with everything necessary. It has already been recalled above that the urgent need in the last war induced several estates to give up the exercise of the right in the last point and to take the advantageous way out of a private agreement with the head of the Empire concerning common victualling, just as smaller estates too made no use, this time, of their right to put their soldiers into the field themselves and came to terms with larger estates that these should see to the raising of the contingent incumbent on the smaller estates. One sees that — if in this there lay a dawn toward a transformation of the furnishing of contingents and delivery of their needs, to be attended to by the estates, into monetary contributions to the common centre, which would then take over what is to be performed and order it, and the beginning of a transition of the isolated and in a manner personal services into a genuine institution of the state in relation to the arrangement of war and finance and the transfer of the latter to the head, whereby the concept of a state alone is realised — this whole relation [has] partly concerned only insignificant estates, partly been a matter of passing accident.
As for the costs which are to be contributed, under the name of Roman months, for those sides of a modern war which are not satisfied by the furnishing of soldiers, the matter stands in just the same way as with the furnishing of contingents. According to the accounts of these, of the war-operations cash funds of the German Empire, it has been shown that about half of what was resolved upon came in. In the last months of the war before the opening of the Congress of Rastatt the public announcements of the cash holdings [gave] the whole sums of 300, 400
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