[p. 472]
|472| right of the state is chiefly only the privilege of the aristocratic institution. Besides, however, that the rational right of the state has come back from the democratic abstractions which reject such an institution altogether, the privilege of this actuality, given in any case, has been set very far from the former feudal right in general by further statutes. – Here it deserves in the first instance only to be singled out that to this element in the royal constitutional charter, which is united with the elected deputies in one chamber, only 50 votes were granted, to the latter by contrast 73 votes, hence a considerable preponderance. This relation of political power departs widely from that which enters with the system of two chambers and which, by its more general introduction and its age alone, has important authority. The contrast of that proportion of votes with the one adopted in the provisional assembly of estates of the Kingdom of Hanover, where to the knightly estate one vote more than to the burgher estate had been assigned, may be cited in passing because the Württemberg estates in the following proceedings have several times provoked the liberal utterances of the Hanoverian legation at the Congress in Vienna concerning German constitutional affairs.
More unexpected still could seem the further extension and almost complete unboundedness which has been given to the democratic principle by the manner of electing the representatives, so that this element enters into the order of the state in an almost wholly loose form. The few tempering features that show themselves here, after the holders of individual votes have already not been set over against it in a chamber of their own, are roughly the provisions that the electoral assemblies are presided over by the royal district officers (Oberamtleute) and in the good towns by the bailiffs (Landvögte), that the persons drawn in for the business of the election, such as the district clerk
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