9) The property of the state may only be used for public purposes approved by the general will, and its administration stands under the constitutional supervision of the representative body of the people. Possessions to which princely houses (and governing persons and families altogether) are entitled under private law naturally remain free from such control; moreover, care is taken to provide for the dignified maintenance of the monarch and his house through an appropriate Civil List* (and appanage etc.) allotted to the state domain.
10) The constitutional monarch is not answerable for his person. However, all bearers of his authority (actually all government or state servants) are answerable – not only to every higher office in their immediate or larger circle and ultimately to the king himself – but rather, and indeed chiefly, to the ministers or highest state servants, and also to the representative body of the people, in the true and lawful exercise of the powers given to them; and a state court of justice created for the crimes and offenses discussed here must be recognized. The members of the representative body of the people, however, since they are just expressing opinions in this capacity, but not actually exercising a real power, merely involved in resolutions by voting, but without being obliged to execute the same, are not answerable in this sphere of their calling, nor is the people itself, in whose name they appear and whose thinking, wishes, and will they are entitled and obliged to express according to their free convictions.
We now wish to contrast these main tenets of the constitutional system – which, for the time being, have only been summarized and are subject to additional comments in the course of this treatise – with the corresponding tenets of the absolutist system.
1) The state is a sum total of persons who are subjugated to one and the same higher authority. By no means does this higher authority emanate from a contract, least of all from a social contract; instead it is either crude lordly power, or that which is based on the possession of land and property or even factual endurance, or is at least bestowed by heaven, and is certainly a power deriving directly therefrom. Between the different members of the state, i.e., the subjects, there is no other connection than that of those partaking in a common relationship, for example, between the servants of the same lord, between the children of the same father, or between those obeying the same master.
2) Here, then, a whole [community] entitled to express its will and a representative body are entirely out of the question. The will of the lord and master or of the head of state established by heaven is the sole source of all law and the sole rule for everything that should or should not happen in the state.
*Taxpayer's money used to support the household of the head of state – trans.
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