[p. 580]
|580| and to ratify what was negotiated. In spite of all this, the authors of the address and the assembly, unanimous with them, were not ashamed to tell the King that, if he would not consent to the transfer of the rights of the estates of the realm to a committee, they must have the conviction that his intention was that no constitution whatever should fall to the people. – The assembly still resorted to the last means in this distress, where everything seemed to it to stand on the brink, – namely to turn to the guarantors. – Herr Bolley expressed himself on it (Section X, p. 37) in such a way that, if the King did not comply with the wishes of the address, not only would every possibility fall away of turning to the Federal Diet as an assembly of estates, but also not much more would be left to lose for the cause itself. – One may find it wonderful enough how the assembly could work itself up into such fever and sultriness; its exaggeration, where a quite simple matter was at issue, could have no purpose but to make credible the worst intentions on the part of the King, the danger of the loss of the cause; and this cause was the reduction of the estates to an old committee.
As for the invocation of the guarantors of the old constitution, all that was lacking was that the estates should also have sent letters to a Diet of the Empire at Regensburg and an Aulic Council in Vienna. They invoked the guarantee of powers which had only just now in Vienna, in common with the rest, consolidated anew the dissolution of the German Empire and the elevation of the duchy of Württemberg to a state, which had reasonably stipulated for the new German states constitutions with estates of the realm in general, not the old ones – and thereby laid into this article the only conceivable guarantee for a new German state, if such should be necessary -, indeed which had not even imposed on the French nation, whose king they had just for the second time led back
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