[p. 542]
|542| stand firm and remain, but how should it be in a position [to] hold them? Partly because of the indeterminateness of the rights quarrel can arise, partly because of their determinateness contradiction of them must arise, and in this quarrel right must maintain itself by its power.
If it makes no sense that that which is called the rights of the German estates should subsist through their inner venerableness and as a moral power, and – because that contradiction takes place – no power to maintain them in the whole extent of their manifoldness can be present and is not present, then the condition would have to set in that a true, not merely passive but active anarchy were present, the genuine old right of the fist, which in the eternal quarrel over property so confused puts the stronger arm for the moment in possession and keeps it therein until the arm of the adversary has become stronger.
This condition, however, the public peace has immediately remedied, and has brought about among the smaller a condition of quiet which has its support in their impotence against the greater. As regards the more powerful, it has already been said above that the possession of the Jülich-Cleves inheritance occasioned the Thirty Years’ War and that in this as little as in other cases, [e.g.] in the Bavarian succession, have courts decided. Otherwise, however, the number of disputed cases that have occasioned a war would seem very small against the infinity of disputed cases which would have to show themselves in the infinite entanglement of rights and which yet have been peacefully – settled? no! but rest. It is known in what endlessness and infinity of lawsuits the German nobility is entangled; how lawsuits were begun a hundred and several hundred years ago but have lain dormant, – still more, [what] infinite number of claims lie buried at rest in every princely, comital, imperial-city, noble archive, that is, rights which
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