Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 473]

|473| and his substitute, are not eligible in the very district in which they have this function; in other districts, however, they are. The capacity to be elected a representative is, as cited above, restricted to very few conditions. In the first place all servants of the state and clergymen, as also the physicians and surgeons, are excluded. The consideration which probably excluded the latter two classes may also have been taken with the former, namely that their official functions permit them no longer absence and other occupation. Apart from the fact that this would also be the case with the holders of individual votes who stand in royal offices, in so far as it is presumably not supposed that they are each time to let themselves be represented by others, and then that, with those employed in the place of the assembly of estates, which will as a rule be the capital, this ground is diminished, this consideration is certainly not significant enough to justify a disposition so extremely important for the main matter. Even in the draft of the basic features of the new constitution of the estates, with whose composition the king himself had occupied himself (see Supplement of Documents, p. 5) and which he had handed over, in a speech delivered in the assembled council of state on the 11th of January 1815, to a special commission of councillors of state and senior officials for deliberation, there occurs the provision (see p. 8) that the royal servants also, in so far as their service relations permit, are eligible.

The reviewer wishes to expand at greater length upon this subject, which is of great importance. – Even this circumstance must not here be overlooked, that in great states, such as France for example and still more England, the whole social condition within and the far-reaching connection without place individuals in wholly different relationships of wealth, of culture and of habit, of living and conducting themselves in more general interests, than in a country of greater narrowness

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