Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 488]

Against refusals on the part of the estates of the realm the prince had, in general, a support and aid in the courts of the Empire. But after Württemberg had become an independent state, the right of granting taxes by estates acquires a like independence and with it an entirely new sense, with regard to which no appeal can be made to the preceding condition. Here the state accordingly requires entirely new guarantees against private-mindedness and against the presumption of the estates, since the former guarantees which the government had in Emperor and Empire no longer exist; an entirely new element, the political, has arisen, into which the estates are placed and which they previously lacked. – German particular history supplies examples enough that the drive of former estates of the realm in their political nullity went towards passive neutrality, preferring to keep all intervention in worldly relations wholly away from themselves and to let whatever might come pass over them in disgrace, rather than to seize upon a self-resolution to action and to honour. Connected with such a drive to dishonour and inaction outwards is the tendency to turn activity, instead of against the external enemies, rather against the government. All too often the estates of the realm have seen in critical circumstances nothing other than an advantageous opportunity to put the government in embarrassment and, for the exertions which it demanded for its own honour and welfare and that of its people, to prescribe conditions and to acquire for themselves concessions of rights against it. All too often they succeeded in bringing thereby misfortune and disgrace upon a land for the present moment, but for the future a restriction and weakening of the power of government and with it a lasting foundation for internal and external disorder. From the political nullity to which the German people had been reduced by its constitution, from the incapacity of the many small wholes, of the greater part of the estates of the Empire, to have a resolution and will of their own,

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