[p. 591]
|591| negotiations, however, embraced the whole extent of the matters of the constitution. – The commissioners of both sides held on 4 December 1815 the first conference. Later (on 17 January 1816) an instructing committee of 12 members, and further on (on 29 February) one of 25, was set beside the estates’ commissioners. The chief part of the labours both of these members and of others who saw fit to join in consisted in collecting materials on chapters of the old constitution according to a plan taken as basis and then in redacting the individual objects into an ordered connection of propositions, on whose content and wording the committee agreed and with which the estates’ commissioners entered into negotiations with the royal ones. Since the estates had once displayed their aversion or incapacity to grasp anything universal and to proceed from such, the fundamental articles appended to the royal rescript of 13 November had also been wholly set aside and ignored by the assembly. Since one now proceeded from the assembling of the particular, there arose of itself the need to reduce these materials to universal propositions, on which the Prince of Öttingen-Wallerstein (Div. XVII, p. 58 and ibid. p. 145) made the motion. This ascent to the universal belongs to the formal side of the political education of a new assembly of estates.
The fruits of this redaction have appeared in print separately as Draft of the Württemberg Constitutional Treaty to be Renewed. After Resolutions of the Estates’ Instructing Committee 1816. – This work has a different look from a collection of recesses of diets, sundry ordinances, and so on, just as it also departs from the old constitution in essentials as to content. Such an ordered compilation of determinate propositions makes the earlier fundamental laws, by the deed, into antiquities. The general clause appended to the draft, which earlier
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