[p. 532]
|532| on the other hand the Germans, united not so much by the power of an external bond of the state as by inner character, and partly the superior power, hindered by no principle of the state, of individual estates, have dissolved the German state by leaving it no state power. The old forms have remained, but the times have changed, and in them customs, religion, wealth, the relation of all the political and civil estates, and the whole condition of the world and of Germany. Those forms do not express this actual condition; the two are separated and contradict one another and have no mutual truth.
Germany set out from a condition at the same time as almost all the states of Europe. France, Spain, England, Denmark and Sweden, Holland, Hungary have matured into a state and have maintained themselves so, but Poland has perished. Italy has divided itself up, and Germany falls apart into a multitude of independent states.
Most of those states were founded by Germanic peoples, and their constitution developed out of the spirit of these peoples. Among the Germanic peoples every free man originally, just as his arm was counted on, so also had a share with his will in the deeds of the nation. The princes, as well as war and peace and all works of the whole, were chosen by the people. Whoever wished took part in the deliberation himself; whoever did not wish refrained of his own free will and relied on the equal interest of the rest.
When, through the alteration of customs and of the manner of life, each became more occupied with his need and his private affairs, when the part of the free men incomparably greater in number, the proper estate of burghers, had to look exclusively to its need and to gain, [when] the states became larger, the external relations more entangled, and those who had to occupy themselves exclusively with them became an estate of their own, and the multitude
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