[p. 471]
|471| and, upon the last answer, which must be motivated, make new representations with regard to the motives.
The estates are further permitted to lay before the king general wishes, representations and complaints, – and the king promises to give a resolution upon every submission of the estates, and also to accept the complaints brought to them by individual subjects, if it is certified that the authorities of the state have refused to accept them.
Finally, the estates can demand the ordering of an investigation against royal officials of the state, and upon the consent, which is never to be refused by the king, judgement is to be pronounced, in the case of high treason and of concussion, by a court of the estates, in other cases by the ordinary course of law.
The infinite importance and liberality of the rights which are here granted to the estates of the realm, as well as the simplicity and openness of these provisions, considered impartially, merely according to their content and without any other regard, certainly do the highest honour to the prince who gave them, as well as to the time in which the right of the state has purified itself of privileges and has matured to principles, and such a work gains still more by comparison with the shapelessness, narrow-heartedness and obscurity through which, in constitutions at home and abroad, namely in the old-Württemberg one, rights of the people are often veiled and stunted in privileges and particularities, restricted and equivocal, indeed often made wholly into an empty semblance. Are the provisions cited not such foundations of a constitution as cannot be otherwise than recognised and accepted with the highest assent? What might be missed cannot be something that would be opposed to them, but only additions and more developed provisions, yet only in conformity with those general truths of a condition of the right of the state. What still stems from the positive
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