[p. 533]
|533| of the needs of the free man, of the nobility, [increased], which had to maintain itself in its estate through industry and labour for the state, – [when] thus the national affairs became more foreign to every individual, the management of the national affairs gathered ever more narrowly into one centre, which [consists] in the monarch and the estates, that is, in a part of the nation, which partly as nobility and clergy speaks for itself personally, partly as third estate is a representative of the rest of the people. The monarch manages the national affairs, especially insofar as they concern the external relations with other states; he is the centre of state power, from which proceeds everything that according to the laws requires compulsion. The power of law is thus in his hands; the estates have a share in legislation, and they furnish the means which the power receives.
This system of representation is the system of all the more recent European states. It was not in the forests of Germania, but it has issued from them; it makes an epoch in world history. The connection of the culture of the world has led the human race, after oriental despotism and the dominion of a republic over the world, out of the degeneration of the latter into this middle between the two, and the Germans are the people out of which this third universal shape of the world spirit has been born.
This system was not in the forests of Germania, for every nation must have run through its own stages of culture independently before it intervenes in the universal connection of the world, and the principle which raises it to the universality of dominion arises only as its peculiar principle applies itself to the rest of the unstable world. Thus the freedom of the Germanic peoples, when, conquering, they flooded the rest of the world, necessarily [became] a feudal system.
The holders of fiefs remained among themselves, in their relation to one another
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