The German Constitution

[p. 515]

|515| small gain great interests [are] not put at stake, but where it seems that it can be made secure, [it is] not neglected.

Because the mass of the German states forms no power, the independence of its parts can be respected only so long as the advantage of other powers requires it and higher interests or also rights of indemnification and so on do not come into play. As regards interest, France, for example, when its armies had occupied half of Germany, could just as well as it abolished the independent states and immediate estateships in the Netherlands and in the lands of the left bank of the Rhine, which were afterwards ceded to France in the peace, also have abolished the constitutions of the lands on the right bank of the Rhine and, even if this shattering of the independence of so many principalities, counties, bishoprics, abbeys, imperial cities and free lordships could not have lasted, have plunged these lands thereby into still much greater misfortune, had not politics, namely consideration towards Prussia and the feared hindrance to peace and so on, and already the utility which an order once established has for the levying of contributions, which according to the official French newspapers¹⁴⁾ have been levied in small measure in these lands, held it back.

14) In the margin: as the French newspapers report, one does not know whether in earnest or as mockery of misery

¹⁵⁾This transition from the condition of open force into

15) In the margin: From the feudal const. Germ. could pass over into a legal const., formerly not either and yet a state, always religion unites men, changed civil customs, raising up of industry, trade, cities, where each cares for himself, no glance at the whole, like the other.
But with this another bond necessary, power of the state, more incomplete, not possible on account of at least disproportionate enlargement of individual states, foreign powers, German estates of the Empire. Plurality, progress in peace treaties, Sweden, England, Prussia, northern barbarism of the Roman Empire.

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