[p. 513]
|513| between prince and subject a mediation may be desirable, then on the other hand, when judicial pronouncements have been issued, by the fact that a mediation is still to be put in the place of execution, the whole standpoint of the moment to which the matter has matured is displaced, and through a seemingly good effect for the moment the essential principle of the constitution is dislocated, or rather it is revealed on such occasions that it was long since dislocated beforehand.
A distinction seems to have to be made here. It is too obvious that the relations of the powerful estates to one another are decided by politics. The smaller estates, on the other hand, seem to owe their existence absolutely to the legal bond of the Empire. There is no imperial city that would hold itself capable of resisting its great neighbouring fellow-estates, any more than a knight of the Empire believes he can maintain his immediacy against a prince either by himself or even through union with the rest of the body of the knighthood of the Empire. The matter speaks for itself, and it is superfluous to cite the fate of the knighthood of the Empire in Franconia; an attempt, and still less the success of an attempt, like that of Franz von Sickingen to conquer an electorate, no longer belongs among the possible things of the present time, just as associations of imperial cities or abbots could no longer achieve what they formerly could.
If the power of the individual estates – nor their power when they combine – is not what maintains them, then they seem to owe their existence as immediate and in a certain sense [in]dependent states to nothing other than the bond of the Empire and the legal constitution that came about through the Public Peace. The question now is, however, through what this so-called legal relation, and with it the subsistence of the knighthood, abbeys, imperial cities, counts and so on, is itself maintained.
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