Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 556]

|556| merit which is more laborious, but at the same time more modest and more real. A burden such as that which had arisen from the excessive preserving of game and the hunts, and which seems to have been hard enough, is well qualified to be disposed of by mere complaining; for to remedy it nothing further is needed than a royal command to shoot the game dead; – and it is clear from the proceedings that the king, upon the first representations of the estates about it, as early as March (II. Div., p. 57), had given orders to put a stop to this evil, “the settlement of which depended in the first instance on him”; when the estates later had doubts about the sufficient effectiveness of these orders, they rightly renewed their representations. But since they also recounted everything else that seemed to them wrong and harmful in the arrangement and housekeeping of the state in one line with those evils, and likewise let it rest with lamenting and complaining, it looked as if they imagined the remedy of these evils also in such a way that the king had only to give the command to shoot them away.

All merit, then, cannot perhaps be denied to that bringing together of infirmities and abuses; but it only makes the lack of the second merit, of contributing actually to a remedy through considered proposals for remedial laws, all the more striking. Indeed, in a preliminary session on the documents mentioned – of 26 June (Div. VIII, p. 8) – there is actually put forward the fine scruple that the ministry might engage with the paper of grievances, – that is, it might divert from the main matter, i.e. the restoration of the old Württemberg constitution, to that paper. Count von Waldek had therefore, together with this doubt, moved for a turn of phrase in the address by which one could safeguard oneself against the engaging. This turn of phrase and safeguard Herr Bolley then indicated he had worked in as follows, “that the estates will not allow themselves to be disturbed by negotiations

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