Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 475]

|475| of merchants, tradespeople, and other owners of property can furnish for an assembly of estates, important as it is, cannot for this purpose be in so numerous a proportion as in England, say, and cannot by itself replace what is lost through the exclusion of the officials of the state.

As important as this exclusion already is through the diminution of the material from which capable deputies can be taken, so much more important is it for the element of disposition, which must be the preponderant one in an assembly of estates if it is not to turn into the most dangerous evil that is possible in a state. This fundamental quality can in general be called the sense of the state. It is not disposed of with abstract insight, nor with mere rectitude and a good disposition for the welfare of the whole and the best of individuals. Owners of landed property, but equally also the individuals engaged in trades and otherwise in possession of a property or a skill, have the interest of the preservation of civil order, but the direct element of their purpose in this is the private element of their possession. If deputies of the estates of the realm bring with them the sense of private interest and private right as their first purpose, upon which the rest is to depend and of which it is to be a consequence, then they set out to haggle off as much as possible from the state and to find it superfluous, if otherwise not inexpedient, yet for their purpose not indispensably necessary, and they come altogether with the will to give as little as possible and to do as little as possible for the universal. – There is no question of what dispositions deputies can have, from whatever estate or relationship they are taken; in arrangements of the state, as in every rational institution, the contingent may not be reckoned with, but the question can only be what the nature of the matter, here of the estate, brings with it.

The sense of the state, however, is acquired chiefly in the

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