Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 555]

|555| complaints and grievances, and on the other side the habit of the governments of receiving along with the grants of their estates also such a moles sent over to them, has so dulled and hardened both parties against it that the drawing up and receiving of these masses of writing sank to the significance of a formality. The reviewer recalls having read, cited somewhere, that when, in the course of the legal proceedings there between him and his estates of the realm in the year 1768, the collection of grievances of the latter was served on the commissaries of Duke Karl of Württemberg by the Imperial Aulic Council in Vienna, those commissaries replied, roughly, that the Aulic Council should not be astonished at such a mass, since for several hundred years the authors of the gravamina had vied with their predecessors in surpassing and outdoing them in description, and that, if one were willing to give credence to such depicting, the land would already have had to be utterly ruined for more than a hundred years.

The Württemberg assembly of estates, to which the royal constitution had opened a quite different path, the path not merely of lodging grievances but of working at the removal of the defects, preferred, since it had run fast aground in its principle of right, of an old-constitutional mode of procedure, to tread merely the path pointed out, the old highway, and to carry together the mass of querelles. For it would have held it against its conscience itself to contribute to a remedy, because by active work it would have believed itself in fact to be recognising the royal constitution. It is also an easier labour to drag together such a mass of grievances than to think out and work out the constitutional and legislative dispositions through which alone that is thoroughly remedied which can be remedied; it is easier, in the former way, merely to puff oneself up into a hollow feeling of fulfilment of duty and a false satisfaction of conscience than, in the second way, to acquire a

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