[p. 538]
|538| that it would become something as firm and inviolable as the general customs or the religion of a people.
But one has often seen customs and religion themselves, even in the most recent times in France, attacked most harshly by commands and force, and if such highly dangerous attempts usually turn out to the ruin of their authors, or at least produce only a very ambiguous effect, nevertheless religion and customs themselves are exposed to the influences of advancing time and of an imperceptible alteration.
Besides this, however, customs and religion and rights of public law by no means stand on the same rank. If it is said that there can be nothing holier than right, then already with regard to private right grace is higher, which can give up its right, and so is the right of the state, which, in order to be able to subsist, cannot leave private right in its whole consequence; already the levies which it must demand are a sublation of the right of property. And political rights, insofar as they are to have the force of private rights, carry a kind of contradiction within them; for they would presuppose that those who had such fixed political rights against one another stood in a relation of right under an authority possessing force and power. But in this case the mutual rights would no longer be political rights, but private rights, rights of property.
Such a relation is supposed to be founded in the German constitution of the Empire. But on the one hand it is already a contradiction in and for itself that not only property but relations that refer immediately to the state should have the form of private right; and, because in Germany no state power is any longer present, the treatment of political rights as private rights, and the security and firmness of the former equal to that of the latter, also falls away, and [they] enter into the general rank of political rights.
One knows what venerableness these have in and for
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