[p. 526]
|526| sceptre, orb, even the shoes, the coat and the jewels of Charlemagne. A more recent emperor is thereby presented so much as the same emperor that Charlemagne was that he even still wears his own clothes. Although the Margrave of Brandenburg now keeps 200,000 soldiers, his relation to the German Empire seems not to have changed since then, when he had not 2,000 men of standing, regular soldiers, because the Brandenburg envoy now at the coronation, as formerly, presents oats to the Emperor.
This German superstition about the wholly external forms, about ceremonial, so ridiculous to other nations, is very well aware of itself; it is the appearance of the original German nature, of holding with untamed tenacity to self-willed independence. In the preservation of these forms the German forces himself to see the preservation of his constitution. Manifestos and state papers speak precisely the same language.
Above, mention has been made of the loss which Germany has suffered against foreign powers; but for Germany as a state it is to be reckoned as a still greater loss when foreign princes have become possessors of German lands of the Empire and thereby members of the German Empire; every enlargement of such a house is a greater loss for Germany’s constitution of the state; it has maintained itself only because the Austrian house, which may be called the imperial house, has not been made strong enough by the German Empire to resist that principle of complete dissolution even in some measure, but has been put in a position to do so by the power of its other lands. Against the union of several German lands in [only] one house in the most lawful way, by inheritance, Germany’s constitution has no guarantee at all; on the contrary, since public power is treated throughout in the legal form of private property, there can be no question of opposition to such a union,
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