[p. 487]
|487| For the direct and indirect levies which formerly, as now, flowed into the princely chamber, and which rest on ground rents, annual dues, tithes, labour services and so on, are dominical rents and, in the sense of private law, the property of the ruler or of the state; they have the existing as their basis and are thus exempt from any consent on the part of the estates of the realm. The other part of the taxes proper, direct and indirect, of the levies which were raised in the sense of public law, was fixed, both in amount and in its application to purposes of state, namely the discharge of the state debts and the payment of the circle troops and household troops, by contract, under the supreme judicial influence and confirmation of the authority of the Empire, so that here too the estates of the realm were bound to the existing as to a law. Even if, out of all the qualifications and particular circumstances under which the former estates of the realm exercised the granting of taxes at all, apart from the case of an increase, a general point of view and the assertion could be drawn, that they possessed this right of consent in a comprehensive sense, such a right nonetheless receives an entirely new position and an incomparably greater extent and importance through the new circumstance that the land of Württemberg has become an independent state from a fief of the Empire. In that condition war and peace were made not by the individual estate of the Empire but by Emperor and Empire; the exertions which a war required were in part fixed once and for all by a matricular assessment. Not to speak of the fact that the formal obstinacy of the German estates, never to render more than could not, rightfully or wrongfully, be averted, had the consequence that the passive exertions became all the greater, – an expenditure which fell back just as unavoidably upon the territorial estates.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.