[p. 574]
|574| that the Old Württemberg scribes, whom one had to use preferably, as men experienced in the field, in the new territory, kept house there worse than at home, as in a conquered land. But the new countrymen, who had grown up and been cultivated in the habit of Old Württemberg right and of this so much praised constitution, recommended themselves badly thereby, and just as badly did they recommend this old right and this old constitution.
The ministry, however, might be reproached for having summoned an assembly of estates whose elements it must have known, and for not having advised the king rather, in addition to the changes which he had undertaken in the upper storeys of the state, to add to them beforehand this, that he should effect the regeneration of the unhappy constitutional condition of the general mass of the people. So long as this civil aristocracy peculiar to Württemberg existed, which by writing drew episcopal revenues as dues and exercised a general power over the communes, their heads and private persons, so long as these heads and the communes were not torn out of the clutches of this privileged caste, so long as this element of ethical and intellectual stagnation, ensnaring the concepts as well as the purse of the mass of the people, was not destroyed, no true concept of right, freedom and constitution could take root, the ministry could expect nothing other than that of the elected deputies a great part would emerge from this element.
It could seem brilliant that the king was the first among the German princes to give his people estates of the realm according to an organisation which was to make them representatives of the rights not of a class but of the people itself, which thereby
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