When the room was emptied, the first of Eymann's members to wake up—he still stood in the sentry-box of the priest's frock—was the index-finger, which stretched itself out, and pointed out to the family-circle the bed. "It would have been more satisfactory and serviceable to me," said he, "to have been strangled to death with that rag, than to have had his Serenissimus spy it out." He meant, however, his own soiled cravat, which he himself had thrown upon the nuptial bed,—that art-chamber and wareroom of his linen. Whenever one contradicted any tormenting notion of his, he argued it so long that at last he believed it himself; but if one admitted it, then he conjured up certain scruples, and adopted a different opinion. "His Highness must inevitably have seen the tattered thing through the bed-curtains," he replied. Finally he travelled over all the places where January had stood, and took observations at the torn neck-tie, and investigated its parallax. "We must adhere to the blinding of the windows, if we want to have any peace," he concluded, and—
So do I.
P. S. I shall always remark after an eighth chapter (because I get ready exactly two Dog-post-days in a week), that I have again worked for the space of a month. I therefore report that to-morrow June comes on.
FIRST INTERCALARY DAY.
Must Treaties be kept, or is it enough that they are made?
The latter.—To-day the mining-superintendent exercises, for the first time, on the reader's ground and soil the right (servitus oneris ferendi, or I may say servitus projiciendi) which, according to the contract of May 4, he actually possesses. The main question now is, whether a dog-contract between two such great powers—inasmuch as the reader has all the quarters of the world, and I, in turn, have the reader—must, after being concluded, also be kept.
Frederick, the Antimachiavellist, answers us, and backs himself by Machiavelli: Certainly every one of us must keep his word so long as it—is for his advantage. So true is this, that such treaties would never be broken, if they were not once—concluded; and the Swiss, who, as late as 1715, swore one with France, might quite as well in all the Cantons have lifted their fingers and taken an oath they would every day regularly—make water.
But so soon as the advantage of contracts ceases, then is a regent entitled to break them in two cases,—those which he makes with other regents, and those he makes with his own step-children of the country,—his subjects.
While I was already at work in the cabinet, (not later than six o'clock, with the goose-wing, dusting the session-table, not with the pen,) I had under the latter a clever fugitive paper, wherein I proposed to show that the ouverture of treaties (au nom de la Sainte Trinité or in nomine Sanctissimæ et individuæ Trinitatis) was the cipher which ambassadors sometimes place over their reports, meaning that the opposite is to be understood. Nothing, however, came of the fugitive paper but a—manuscript. In this I was simple enough, and proposed first to advise princes, that, in regard to lies of necessity and truths of necessity, they must have, for every latitude and hour, declinations and inclinations. I proposed to whistle the state-chanceries to myself into a corner, and whisper in their ears, I would never suffer it, and, though I had only nine regiments in pay and starvation, that my hands and feet should be glued together with the sealing-wax of contracts, and my wings clogged with ink. That would I for the first time introduce into state-praxis; but the state-chanceries laughed at me, afar off in my foolish corner, and said, The whistler may believe, himself,—we do the thing otherwise.
In the works of Herr Herkommen[[109]]—the best German publicist, who, however, writes no acta sanctorum it is proved that a reigning prince need not observe at all any treaties, privileges, and concessions granted by his predecessor to his subjects; hence it follows that he is far less bound to keep his own covenants with them, since the enjoyment of the benefit of these covenants, which consists in nothing but the keeping or breaking, manifestly vests in him as proprietor. Mr. Herkommen says the same on every page, and absolutely swears to it. Nay, can there be a dean or rector magnificus who exercises so little reason—considering that, according to a general assumption, a king never dies, and consequently predecessors and successors grow together into one man—as not to draw from this the conclusion that the successor may regard his own covenants as those of his predecessor, and accordingly, since the two make only one man, may break them just as much as if they were transmitted ones?