[p. 496]
|496| back to itself, it has always known how to arrange matters so that it lost still more, and so enlarged the fund of the Empire. Accordingly the loss of the left bank of the Rhine too must be regarded from a more consoling side, namely as a way of the possibility of founding a financial fund of the Empire.
If such thoughts, thorough in their time — and one [can] be sure that, if a German teacher of public law were even now spoken to of the unhappy lack of finances, he would vindicate the perfection of this side too of the constitution of the German Empire with the way shown — were still capable of giving the German character, sanguine in such hopes, a hope in them in the present political condition of Europe and Germany, they nevertheless cannot be counted when it is considered whether Germany possesses the kind of power that in our times belongs to the essence of a state, a monetary power in fact and in the present time in which we speak.
Formerly there was a special way, when — not in a foreign war, but in one against a rebellious and outlawed estate — another estate had costs on behalf of the state, of bearing this general expenditure and compensating the latter. For when executions of declarations of outlawry and other decisions of the courts of the Empire, which is not always the case, were actually set in motion, the costs fell upon the losing party, if it loses, that is, not merely in right but also in war. The army of execution of the Empire in the Seven Years’ War received no compensation for its trouble. That way of having the costs of execution paid was in older times a powerful spur sometimes actually to execute a declaration of outlawry, in that the executing party kept the lands of the executed party without further right or other closer accounting — as the Swiss came into possession of the greater part of the old Habsburg
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