Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 503]

|503| which such illegality is possible; a good constitution is surely only one when through it illegalities are punished and even more prevented. – If this was done to the green wood, one might ask, what shall come of the dry? If plunder and squandering took place at a time when Emperor and courts of the Empire still stood above the estates of the realm, when the estates themselves had ended a protracted, most costly lawsuit against their prince on account of extortions and illegalities and had taken over a great mass of debts – the discharge of which, for nearly 50 years up to this hour, may not yet be completed; – at a time which one hears extolled as a time of German honesty, of worthiness of the estates of the realm, of a felicity created by the constitution, in contrast to the corruption, the luxury and the wrong of more recent times!

But whether the evil, that the independence of the estates of the realm made it possible for them to plunder the state chest, be now a necessary consequence, or whether it could be checked by laws and altered institutions, there always remains the far greater evil in relation to the state, that the independence of the estates of the realm in the disposition and administration of a state chest makes it possible for them to make the course of the state difficult, indeed to obstruct it, partly on the side of internal affairs, partly in particular on the side of the political relation to other states, which lies in any case more remote from the estates of the realm, indeed is often hateful to them, and to the German ones has hitherto in general been foreign. The notion of wanting to put into the hands of estates of the realm, or of whatever corporation in the state it might be, a military power and army independent of the government would be regarded by everyone as a measure shattering the state; but it would be no great difference if the disposition of the whole or of a part of the state chest, and the authority to grant salaries and pensions from it, were to belong to such a corporation.

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