The German Constitution

[p. 455]

|455| really a private law, and the political rights [are] a legal possession, a property.

As the private man A has inherited, bought, received as a gift the house a, a private man B a garden b etc., so a member of an estate or an office A possesses as property 6 peasants, B 600 peasants; as the private man C possesses a small shop, much cornfield, also vineyards, so the estate C or the office C possesses the high and low jurisdiction over 5 houses, the right to tithes over 100 villages, the position D has a piece of the power of taxation over 2000 citizens and a [right] to have a say in war and peace of all Germany, another [has] a piece of the power of taxation over a million people and nothing at all to say about the war and peace of all Germany. Executive, legislative, judicial, ecclesiastical, administrative power are mingled, divided and combined in the most lawless manner and mixed and separated in the most unequal proportions, just as manifold as the property of the citizens as private persons; and the ground of right of both is the same.

What state, then, should seem better organized than that in which every right to a share in public power⁶⁾ has been determined most exactly, every circumstance relating to it has been the subject of the most protracted discussions? in which the solicitude for this political property has extended, with the most punctilious scrupulousness, to each and every thing, to the seemingly greatest trifles, e.g. order in sitting, walking and the like, titulature, with an infinite, admirable exactitude for the preservation of every right?⁷⁾

6) In the margin: [as it] is determined exactly, piece by piece, with regard to its extent, in the treaties etc., so too peace treaties of the Imperial Diet, house treaties, electoral capitulations, mandates of the imperial courts etc. have exactly determined the political property of every estate and place.

7) In the margin: Powers which according to the essence of a state stand under the direction of a centre, must be united in a supreme power (monarch and estates), military power, relations to foreign powers, the part of the finances that relates to this etc. – all this stands under no supreme power in law.

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