Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 489]

|489| there had to proceed a spirit of sinking into private interest and of indifference, indeed of hostility, towards the thought of having a national honour and of making sacrifices for it. – If, for example, in the English nation the feeling of national honour has more generally pervaded the various classes of the people, then the right of Parliament to grant the levies annually has an entirely different sense than the same right would have in a people that was brought up in the private-minded outlook and, because it lay outside the political standpoint, was kept in the spirit of narrowness and private self-seeking. Already against such a spirit the governments would need, for the preservation of the state, a new guarantee, since they have in any case lost the scarcely sufficient one from Emperor and Empire. The right of participation in the determination of the state levies, however it may formerly have been constituted, is now, since the estates have no superior above them but their government of the state, to which they at the same time stand opposed, in and for itself an infinitely higher, more independent authority than before, just as they thereby receive a relation to and influence upon war and peace, upon external policy in general as well as upon the internal life of the state.

By the circumstance that the existing levies were taken as the basis by the royal constitution for the lifetime of the reigning monarch, the right of taxation was indeed given a restriction in form; for in substance it is in any case restricted by the necessity of need. This necessity could now very well be present with regard to the magnitude of the levies; – in all states the need of the last years – and in the richest, like England, most of all – has driven the impositions to a height never before imagined, and France, Austria and others have helped themselves in these financial embarrassments only by arbitrary, violent operations. Apart now from the need, of which nowhere has any proof

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