[p. 586]
|586| that the people be robbed of its history, that all earlier fundamental laws be made antiquities; – one could rather ask whether a people has really had a history which was not an independent state but only a part of a people, whether a people in fact does not first acquire a history when it becomes a state. – That in this address the estates declare themselves unable to state the rights of the Württemberg subjects because the old archive of the estates was still withheld from them has been cited above, – as if the constitution as such were concerned with a code of criminal and civil law, and so on, and as if the royal constitutional charter had allowed nothing more of these rights to hold! – The simple and monotonous closing petition is that the king should solemnly recognise the Old Württemberg constitution as a rule valid for the whole kingdom, solely with the reservation of such modifications as are, by mutual acknowledgement, necessary or expedient.
The estates had at first conceded only such modifications of the Old Württemberg constitution as related to the incorporation of the nobility and the community of rights of Protestants and Catholics; according to their address the “final recess” now to be drawn up was only to be added to the chaos of the old laws of the land which were recounted above. If it was to concern only those two objects, it would still have been the same untenable notion, or rather the wholly empty delusion, of wishing for the rest to let the old constitution – the Old Württemberg one at that – come into force, with neglect and suppression of all claims of the New Württemberg parts of the territory to their peculiar rights – under the wholly altered position of the kingdom towards the duchy. But as that agreement to be reached was to contain more – and the nature of the matter would have brought this about of itself, the petition of the address also speaks of it in more general terms -, so the
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