The greatest difficulties came with the three Inner Austrian Provinces. All the Austrian Provinces, but particularly these three, had managed their affairs in so irresponsible and unbusinesslike a fashion that the Court – that is, the Chancelleries of the day – had allowed them to accumulate a so-called domestic debt of twenty-four million, the interest on which amounted to 200,000 gulden. It was the financial weakness of these lands that involved them in this big debt, and was also the reason why the quotas allocated to them were regarded in advance as impossibly high, and in certain cases could really be regarded as such.
The Inner Austrian Provinces had been treated with particular indulgence by my Government, and had often been allowed to give IOU’s for sums due from them; they consequently found it much harder than any others to submit to the proposed orderly system. It was thus only possible to obtain from Styria a Recess of three years, and that with the utmost difficulty.
In Carniola we had to wait a whole year before we could achieve a three years’ Recess, and that after remitting the sum due on the debt.
There was no doing anything in Carinthia, and after failing to bring the Estates to any kind of reason, I was compelled to collect the tax jure regio, although in order to help them I had, a year before, at Count von Haugwitz’s suggestion, sent two Commissioners, to the latter of whom, Rudolph Count von Chotek, they gave their written consent to the Recess but withdrew it three weeks later. They were constantly lamenting that they could not raise the State tax, but refused to make any economies in their local or supplementary administration, and proposed – out of ignorance or malice – to increase the burdens of the unfree population. That is the reason why I had the sum collected myself, jure regio (i.e., by virtue of my supreme prerogative).
The Estates’ persistent representations that the burdens were too heavy for them, which were not without their force, although the fault lay in their own unbusinesslike methods, naturally led me to make provision for a better and more equitable management of the local finances. And I must insist that it is generally true that the prime cause of the decay of my Hereditary Lands lies in the over-great freedom the Estates had gradually usurped; for the Estates seldom behaved justly, their Presidents usually simply doing as their predecessors had done and furthering their private advantages, while refusing or rejecting any help that justice demanded should be given to the poor oppressed classes, and thus as a rule letting one Estate oppress another.
The final purpose of most of the so-called prerogatives of the Estates was simply to secure an arbitrary free hand for some of their members, who claimed an inordinate authority over the rest.
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