[p. 525]
|525| the lands of his house, a sufficient state power and the individual vassals could not have swollen to overpowering size, the feudal constitution of Germany could have preserved the state. It is not the principle of the feudal constitution that cut off the possibility of Germany’s being a state, but the disproportionate enlargement of individual estates that destroyed the principle of the feudal constitution itself and the subsistence of Germany as a state.
The power of these individual states has let no state power arise in Germany, and their enlargement has made it ever more impossible. The obstinate essence of the German nature in regard to independence has made everything that might serve for the erection of a state power and for the union of society into a state into a thoroughly formal thing, and has held just as obstinately to this formality. This obstinacy in regard to formality is not to be comprehended otherwise than as the resistance to the reality of union, which is averted by the assertion of that formal essence, and this immutability of the form is passed off as immutability of the thing.
As the Roman emperors, who put an end to the anarchy of the Roman republic and brought the Empire together again into a state, preserved all the outer forms of the republic intact, so, for the opposite purpose, all the signs of the German union of the state have for centuries been conscientiously preserved in Germany, even though the thing itself, the state, has vanished and has dissolved, not indeed into open anarchy, but into many separate states. The constitution seems to have suffered no change at all in the thousand years that have elapsed since Charlemagne, if the newly elected Emperor still now at the coronation wears the crown, the
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