[p. 486]
|486| deserves that name only if it is the arrangement that what should happen does happen.
Since the reporter has become so prolix on this point, the remarks on the others must be kept shorter. – The estates have been granted the prerogative that without their consent no new taxes shall be introduced and the existing ones not increased. Württemberg may well have been the first German land in which general estates of the realm came into possession of this right so early and in so open and definite a manner; the estates of the realm that we have seen emerge or revive elsewhere contain, in part, highly restrictive elements from the feudal constitution, and in part their formation and the determination of their sphere of operation still seem to stand in too provisional and murky a light for them to be compared with the free, frank and clear form in which the monarch of Württemberg wished to place his own. – The bloody struggle of the Tyroleans against forms of state administration which they believed to be contrary to their old, inherited rights aroused general interest; upon the eventual reintroduction of their former constitution, the monarch reserved to himself the determination of the sum of the state levies and left to the estates only the apportionment. It may now be disputed whether the old Württemberg estates already possessed the right conceded to them by the King’s constitution, or not, and whether they did not earlier possess a far more extensive one, – a dispute which is without practical interest, and which for that very reason would be all the more suited to make a proper querelle d’Allemand. One may well say that by the provision that the existing taxes be left in place and that only an increase should not take effect without their approval, the Württemberg estates were formally put back roughly on the standpoint on which the former Württemberg territorial estates found themselves.
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