[p. 495]
|495| nor bound was the most prominent, the whole was thus less in earnest than a pious wish — with which kind of wishes the true, inwardly lying indifference to the object to which the wish relates, and at least the firm resolve to let it cost nothing, are wont to be hidden behind an especially patriotic-seeming manner and mien — it is not to be doubted that, if the Empire were just then occupied with an arrangement of finance, in a company of honest citizens of the Empire the one who, for the good of the German Empire, put forward the wish that a mountain of gold should grow up in Germany, and that every ducat coined from it, which, when first spent, was not applied to the Empire, should at once run away like water — [that] such a wisher would be regarded as the greatest German patriot who had ever existed, because in the first moment they would have the feeling of not having to pay anything in this way before the reflection that by such a wish not a farthing comes into the treasury of the Empire, and, if the reflection really set in, they could nevertheless find expressed nothing other than what they themselves, notwithstanding their words, wanted.
Apart from this, earlier Diets of the Empire have designated for the need of such a fund no such ideal, merely imagined sources, but, without any estate having to sacrifice anything of its own, real existing lands, actual realities, for the defraying of costs of the affairs of the Empire, as those huntsmen designated a real, not an imagined, bear for the payment of their reckoning.
Several hundred years ago a law was made that for the establishment of a fund of the Empire all those lands should be designated which have fallen into the hands of foreign nations, if the German Empire brings them back to itself; and in the wars themselves, in which the opportunity was therefore present for the German Empire to bring them
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