[p. 585]
|585| deputies. It seems that this laying down of positions, as well as the election of new deputies, met with no objection and that the ministry let it happen, without anything having been determined about it in the royal constitutional charter. There was in any case still lacking, too, a requirement essential to every assembly, a set of rules of procedure; thus one sees the assembly, in this new first sitting, in which such princely splendour entered it, make use, for its show of respect, of the same gesture which, as cited above, had signified in the very first the voting on its resolution. – Much indeterminacy as there still lay in the relation of the mediatised lords to the state and to an assembly of estates, it could suffice that they now recognised themselves as mediatised lords of the kingdom, – for an assembly which itself found and held itself still wholly in the same indeterminacy. Had it been possible for it to enter into matters of the constitution with respect to a content, that insufficiency would soon have had to come to light.
In the resolution of 16 October the King had further called upon the estates so to instruct their already existing plenipotentiaries for negotiations that a settlement valid for the whole could be concluded. The estates replied with an address twelve sheets strong in small print (Section XI, pp. 263-286), for whose thorough elaboration the assembly gave its thanks to Herr Bolley. It repeats the old views in the usual manner; there is no need to extract anything from it, only this, that on p. 269 it says: even a superficial acquaintance with the Württemberg constitution yields the conviction that it constituted a self-subsisting, closed whole; – one can grant this sentence in one sense, but even that hardly, for to such a conviction, or rather judgement, even a merely superficial acquaintance is already far too much. – It is said further, among other things, therein that the estates cannot concede

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