The German Constitution

[p. 514]

|514| Evidently not by its own power – for there is no state power present -, but likewise [through] politics. If politics is not regarded directly as the foundation of the existence of the less powerful estates, this happens only because in reasoning one stops at the bond of the Empire, which constitutes a middle term, as a foundation, and forgets by what this bond of the Empire is itself borne.

States like Lucca, Genoa and so on maintained themselves for centuries without a bond of the Empire, until they experienced the fate of Pisa, Siena, Arezzo, Verona, Bologna, Vicenza etc. etc. – in short, one could enumerate the whole geography of the cities, principalities, counties and so on of Italy -; the republic [of Venice], which seemed more powerful and had previously swallowed so many independent cities, was brought to an end by the arrival of an adjutant, who delivered the mere command of the general of a foreign power. These states, to which, while from the lottery of fate the several hundred Italian sovereign lands drew blanks, the few winning tickets of a somewhat prolonged independence had fallen, subsisted merely through the jealous politics of the larger states bordering on them, with whose power they had in previous centuries been able to engage in a struggle, but, without any external loss, had become quite disproportionately weak against them. But in the equal share of the booty, in the equality of enlargement or diminution, the jealousy of politics likewise finds itself satisfied, and in the combinations of interests arising from this, states like Venice, Poland and so on are lost.

The transformation of the law of the fist into politics is not to be regarded as a transition from anarchy into a constitution. The true principle has not changed, only its outward side. In the condition before the Public Peace the offended or the one lusting for conquest simply struck out. In politics, on the other hand, one calculates before one strikes, and for the sake of a

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