Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 546]

|546| consideration. In the proceedings of this assembly of the estates the feeling against the drawing of a salary, and any stirring of this as of other important objects, is not mentioned at all, – as if it went without saying that the deputies are salaried, at least, as occurs once, that they receive reimbursement of their costs. – That reproach, if the reporter rightly recalls, did not fail to appear publicly either. – But the most fanciful demand which an assembly of estates could make was that it should be able to appoint yet another committee with special salaries and with pensions and, to crown it, in order to legitimate in advance the incapacity and laziness of the committee members, should be allowed to add and bestow, as formerly, posts of counsel.

It helps nothing that the leaders of the estates did not lay claim, for the committee, of which they might appear as the most qualified members, to the whole condition and right of the former secret chest. With the salaries of committee members, and above all with the granting of pensions to those who, as it says in the draft of the Württemberg constitution to be renewed, “have given themselves up wholly to the service of the fatherland and received the appointment to live in Stuttgart (what devotion!), but who at the renewal of the committee, to take place every three years, are not appointed anew”, to whom “on account of the ‘sacrifice’ made to the fatherland an annual compensation was to be paid until their reappointment”, – hereby a condition would be brought back, the abolition of which, though perhaps not the committee members themselves or those who could have the prospect of being elected to it, yet surely the estates and above all the people had to regard as the greatest step to a free and popular constitution and as the greatest benefit that more recent times have brought. – Of equal or even greater influence is the circumstance that through such a standing committee the most important thing, the

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