But perhaps not. Paine had written other things. There was, for example, "One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an ASS FOR A LION."
Considering that Gustavus Adolphus was called "The Lion of the North" and what that would imply about the king, maybe he shouldn't send him the pamphlet.
A year and a half ago, he would have sent it.
Today, he had to stop and think. He had responsibilities.
Powerful people forgave some things more easily than others. They tended to find ridicule very hard to forgive.
Prudence had to be among the more disgusting of the cardinal virtues.
Perhaps the Swede's officials would not be unduly influenced by Schulte's appeal to tradition. Even in this matter, there was some comfort to be drawn from Thomas Paine, who had written: ". . . A long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason."
He only wished that he had time.
Not only in the matter of Herr Schulte's claims.
There was scarcely a farmer in Franconia against whom some claimant did not have some ghost of a reason to file a lawsuit.
It was a situation that made men nervous. The majority of villagers were not primarily worried about the actions of their landlords, or even about the actions of their lords. With the war, landlords were happy to have tenants. Like a barren cow, untenanted farms did not provide milk—or rents, dues, and tithes. With the war, lords were happy to have their subjects within their own territories. Refugees, run into some safer jurisdiction, did not pay taxes.
But an avaricious man, greedy for property, was very often willing to file a suit against the current lessee and the lessor, both.
Claiming "tradition."
Tradition be damned. With any luck, the administrators sent by the thrice-damned king of Sweden might understand that also.
A century before, in the Great Peasant War, der grosse Bauernkrieg, Germany's farmers had based their demands upon tradition, upon a return to long-established ways of doing things.
It had made sense, back then, when the landlords were trying to abolish the long-established communal rights over pasture and woodlands. That was oversimplified. But in the Germanies, if one did not oversimplify, the forest definitely got lost in the thickets of individual trees. One reached the point that one could not find a general rule because there were so many thousand exceptions to it.
Simplify, Thomas Paine had written. "I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered; . . . ."
The man had been a dreamer. Or, at least, simplicity was not to be found in Franconia. Not in this summer of 1633.
Even the uptimers had learned that. They spent a lot of their time trying to understand land tenure. They spent even more of their time trying to adjudicate disputes among and between various claimants to property rights.
Mostly near the larger cities, where they had their headquarters. Where their writ ran with some effectiveness.
Up here, in a village near the border with Coburg, their writ had not yet made much impact. No villager in this region had ever seen any of the uptimers except the "Hearts and Minds" team. Who were, for them, the bringers of free newspapers and pamphlets. Newspapers, in particular, with Brillo stories.
Which meant that both parties to the Schulte suit, rather than hiring expensive lawyers in Bamberg, had appealed to the ram to decide the issue.
So Schulte's appeal was on his table, under the pewter plate.
And Herr Schulte was standing in the door of the room, expressing the opinion that Constantin Ableidinger could not reach an impartial judgment in the matter because he, like the other party to the suit, descended from Austrian exiles.
Paine had covered a lot in that little pamphlet called Common Sense.
* * *
In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided every thing which is personal among ourselves. Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof. The wise, and the worthy, need not the triumph of a pamphlet; and those whose sentiments are injudicious, or unfriendly, will cease of themselves unless too much pains are bestowed upon their conversion.
Ableidinger tried to follow the same principle in everything he wrote. For now, he kept his face impassive while he listened to Schulte rant.