the Empire and in forming the confederation of States. It cannot be maintained that most of the States ever really enjoyed genuine 4‘sovereignty”.
The rights of sovereignty which the States renounced in order to make the Empire possible were given up in a very small measure of their own free will. In most cases they were either non-existent, or they had simply been lost under the pressure of Prussia’s superior strength. The principle followed by Bismarck was not to give to the State merely what had been taken away from the smaller States, but to demand from the States what the Empire absolutely required. But it is quite wrong to ascribe the decision of Bismarck’s to any conviction on his part that the State was thus acquiring all the rights of sovereignty which it would require for all time ; on the contrary, he meant to leave over for the future what would have been hard to attain at the moment. And the sovereignty of the Reich has, in actual fact, continuously increased at the expense of the individual States. The passing of time achieved what Bismarck hoped it would achieve.
The German collapse and the destruction of the monarchical State-form necessarily hastened these developments.
The same cause struck a hard blow at the federative character of the Reich ; a harder blow still was struck by the acceptation of the obligations under the “Peace” Treaty.
It was both natural and obvious that the countries lost control of their finances and had to renounce it to the Reich, from the moment when the Reich, having lost the War, submitted to financial obligations, which were never considered as being covered by contributions from the individual States. The further decision, which led to the Reich taking over the railways and postal services, was a necessary and progressive step in the gradual enslavement of our nation under the Peace Treaty.