Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 476]

|476| habitual occupation with the general affairs, in which not only is the infinite worth which the universal has in itself felt and recognised, but also the experience of the resistance, the hostility and the dishonesty of private interest, and the struggle with it, in particular with its obstinacy in so far as it has fixed itself in the form of right, is gone through. Since the deputies are elected, it is an essential consideration that the electors should proceed chiefly from such relationships in which this sense must be present and in which it is formed. The former minister of the interior in France, Vaublanc, took into his draft of a law for the manner of election of the chamber of deputies directly the provision that the royal officials of every kind, together with the clergy, in the departments should make up the majority of the electors. There is agreement on this, that the English constitution is maintained through that alone which is called its abuses, namely through the wholly unequal and therefore unjust, indeed in part quite senseless privileges in respect of the rights of election, by which alone, however, it becomes possible that the government can in general reckon on the majority of votes. – It is an opinion of the uninstructed, in this connection, to regard the opposition party as a party against the government or against the ministry as such; if the opposition attacks not merely individual ministerial measures, which is also done by the independent members who otherwise in the main vote with the ministry, but combats it in each and every respect, its struggle goes only against this particular ministry, not against the government and against the ministry in general. What is often reproached to them as something bad, namely that they only want to get into the ministry themselves, is precisely their greatest justification, quite the contrary of the tendency which one often sees praised in German estates of the realm or individuals as bravery

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