ncy, to be more united by the
necessity of self-defense, its situation is still deplorable. Military
preparations must be preceded by so many tedious discussions, arising
from the jealousies, pride, separate views, and clashing pretensions of
sovereign bodies, that before the diet can settle the arrangements, the
enemy are in the field; and before the federal troops are ready to take
it, are retiring into winter quarters.

The small body of national troops, which has been judged necessary in
time of peace, is defectively kept up, badly paid, infected with
local prejudices, and supported by irregular and disproportionate
contributions to the treasury.

The impossibility of maintaining order and dispensing justice among
these sovereign subjects, produced the experiment of dividing the
empire into nine or ten circles or districts; of giving them an interior
organization, and of charging them with the military execution of the
laws against delinquent and contumacious members. This experiment
has only served to demonstrate more fully the radical vice of the
constitution. Each circle is the miniature picture of the deformities of
this political monster. They either fail to execute their commissions,
or they do it with all the devastation and carnage of civil war.
Sometimes whole circles are defaulters; and then they increase the
mischief which they were instituted to remedy.

We may form some judgment of this scheme of military coercion from a
sample given by Thuanus. In Donawerth, a free and imperial city of the
circle of Suabia, the Abbe de St. Croix enjoyed certain immunities
which had been reserved to him. In the exercise of these, on some public
occasions, outrages were committed on him by the people of the city. The
consequence was that the city was put under the ban of the empire, and
the Duke of Bavaria, though director of another circle, obtained an
appointment to enforce it. He soon appeared before the city with a
corps of ten thousand troops, and finding it a fit occasion, as he had
secretly intended from the beginning, to revive an antiquated claim, on
the pretext that his ancestors had suffered the place to be dismembered
from his territory,(1) he took possession of it in his own name,
disarmed, and punished the inhabitants, and reannexed the city to his
domains.

It may be asked, perhaps, what has so long kept this disjointed machine
from falling entirely to pieces? The answer is obvious: The weakness of
mo