The Emperor Leopold was the first of my forbears who kept a firm grip on his sovereign authority and insisted on maintaining it against all comers, which considerations led him often to change his Ministers and, under certain circumstances, disgrace them. But this only made the Ministers more cautious, and, since he did not change the old Constitution, he was unable to assert his authority to remedy the abuses which had crept in.
When a Minister was replaced, his successor had not, perhaps, the same prejudices, but always maintained the old main principles both of maintaining his own authority and securing advantages for his Province, so that such changes often only made matters worse. I myself have experienced cases in which such changes neither enhanced my own authority nor led to diminution of the abuses.
Such abuses really derive from two main causes: the first, the egotism and craving for power innate in most men, inasmuch as the Ministers were large landowners in their own Provinces, and for that reason even the new men followed the same principles of self-preservation and looked more to their own interest and that of their families than to the general welfare.
The other reason is that these Ministers and heads of Provinces represented the Provinces’ acquired privileges and liberties to the Monarch in so formidable a light that the latter were often left powerless to safeguard the general welfare. In order somehow to get what was indispensably necessary out of the Estates, the Prince was forced to utilize the credit and prestige of his Ministers and to grant their demands with a good grace, if he was to save himself and the State from the threatened ruin.
These vaunted privileges are, when one looks at them closely, mostly founded on customary rights which were in fact only conceded tacitly and then confirmed by earlier Monarchs, which customs, in respect of their periodical confirmation, are attributable solely to the credit, prestige, and power of the Ministries, which ordinarily consisted exclusively of Estates. And since the formula of confirmation speaks expressly of “honorable, ancient customs,” the maintenance of them is rightly to be understood only as applying to those ancient customs which are good, not to the bad.
It is certain that in no country would the Estates ever have developed their freedoms so far, had they not been powerfully supported by the Ministers, since their authority and credit depended exclusively on this, and the Court was most to blame for this, for they brought it on themselves, and were willing to give and do anything to get money quickly; whereas, if the Prince had not felt himself dependent on the arbitrary yes or no of the Estates, he would not have needed to appeal to the prestige and authority of the Ministers to get his way.
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