Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 479]

|479| – of which several examples are cited in the same place.

In the relationship of these ministeriales, then, at least, even though otherwise a vassalage and even something of a bondage lies in it, the other circumstances dropped away, according to which one could believe them to be for the interest of the prince, against the people, in the sense in which princely servants were later taken roughly for princely lackeys and for a class excluded from the people. This latter position they had in so far as the revenues which they had to collect and to account for, as also the judicial and police power which they had to exercise in the name of the prince, counted more as rights of a private possession and of the private power of a third party against the citizens than as revenues of the state and duties of the state. But as the domanial possession and the family entails of the princely families have in later times approached ever more the character of property of the state, and the bailiff’s and other rights over subject and bondage people have begun to pass over into the more rational character of duty of the state and power of the state, so the princely servants too have come, beyond the dependence of their salaries upon arbitrary will, to rights in their offices and to the dignity of servants of the state. This transition from the administration of a private possession into the administration of rights of the state is one of the most important which has been introduced by time, and which has also no longer left the relationship of the officials in the determination which held at the time of the former Württemberg constitution; – it is one of the changes which then became fixed and completed with the general transition of a non-sovereign principality into a state. – Since the positive right of the state, which the assembly of estates chiefly made the basis of its claims, has history for its basis, the general remark may be appended here that it is precisely history

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