Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 582]

|582| was to be found, it could, after the experience so far, hold itself convinced of the impossibility and justified before the whole world if it did not convoke them again. Such a sitting together is nevertheless always of infinite importance for the political education which a people and its heads require, a people that [had] hitherto lived in political nullity and whose education was not, as with a still unprejudiced people, simply to begin from the very beginning, but which was also ensnared in the hard fetters of an oppressive aristocracy, of an internal constitution built upon it, and in the lack and perversity of concepts about the rights of the state and of freedom, or rather in words. Against such concepts, which, as has been seen, were so closely bound up with the firmly and securely established interest of the ruling caste, no direct struggle can be entered into with concepts, nor any direct effect be expected from it; all the more certain, though unobtrusive, is the indirect effect, that such a mind is given room to wear itself out against itself and to bring itself to light. The nearest effect on the public is that, as such a distorted content develops further, it soon no longer understands anything of it and of its defence. One consequence, the uncovering of the rights of the institution of scribes, and with it a more correct and more widespread consciousness of where a permanent source of oppression lies – characters and actions of rulers, as well as circumstances, are by contrast only something transitory -, has been considered, and an effect at least of formal culture will show itself in future. Since, given those presuppositions, it could not have succeeded and had not succeeded to introduce the constitution a priori, there remained only this, to set the estates on the path of their education by themselves – a path to which human beings indeed also have a right; it does honour to the prince and his ministry to have opened it in the confidence that it,

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