Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 500]

|500| the right of the former Württemberg estates of the realm to hold the tax chest in their hands. There was connected with it for them the right not only to enjoy daily allowances themselves, but also to appoint officials, consultants and above all a committee, and to assign salaries from the tax chest to its members as well as to those officials. Indeed, this committee itself had the administration of the chest, from which it drew its salary, determined on the whole by the estates; but beyond this its right of administration extended so far that it even decreed for itself supplements to salaries and remunerations, and further decreed and paid out to its members as well as to other individuals rewards and pensions for real or imagined services; indeed precisely this application of the moneys of the land for the personal, for itself, which honour will most of all disdain to keep secret, was withdrawn from all control.

Very closely related to the internal disorder and ethical sinking into the mire that lie in such a private plundering and such a condition in general is the formal disorder of the state, that estates of the realm, by means of the chest which they hold in their hands, for themselves, as a kind of sovereign power, enter into connection with external powers for their purposes. From one’s own chest it is no great step to the maintenance of one’s own troops, and it would only be ridiculous to forbid the latter to estates by law, while through the former putting the power and the means for it into their hands. When the aforementioned intermediate and superior power of the Emperor and Empire was still present, such a consequence could be prevented in individual cases, – namely where that power was effective, as also in the case that it was pleased to be; but it remained a contingency whether this consequence was prevented or not. Yet in the German Empire there was no lack either of cases in which estates were entitled to keep their own troops, as for example in East Frisia the city of Emden, nor of the fact that in this very

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