The German Constitution

[p. 534]

|534| and to the whole, what they were, free people; but they acquired subjects, and thereby they entered at the same time into relations of duty to him whom they had freely, without duties, placed at their head or whom they had followed. These contradictory properties of a free man and of a vassal are united in this, that the fiefs are not fiefs of the person of the prince but of the Empire. The connection of the individual with the whole people now receives the form of duty, and his possession of a fief and of a power does not depend on the arbitrary will of the prince, but is rightful and proper to him and therefore hereditary. If in despotisms the dignity of a hospodar can have a kind of hereditariness, even this is an arbitrary will; or if such a hereditary power is connected with a more independent state of its own, like Tunis etc., then it is tributary and not, like the holders of fiefs, a partaker in the common deliberations. In these the personal and the representative character of the vassal are mingled; in the latter he represents his land, he is the man of it, at the head of its interest, he is personally one with it. Moreover, the people belonging to the vassal in many states have, besides being subjects, at the same time become burghers, or the isolated free people who did not become barons have united into burgher communities, and this estate of burghers has received a representation of its own as well.

In Germany that part of the estate of burghers which has for itself a representation in the general state is not at the same time subject, and the subjects have no separate representation in the general state; but they have it through their princes, and they have it again within the compass of the particular state which they make up, in relation to their princes.

In England the higher and lower nobility, with [the loss of] territorial lordship, has at the same time lost a degree of its character of being the representative of a part of the people,

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