Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 480]

|480| which teaches us to recognise the circumstances under which a provision of a constitution was rational, and here gives, for example, the result that, if the exclusion of royal officials from the estates of the realm was rational in earlier times, it is no longer so now under other circumstances. – That the assembly of estates recalled neither the old relationship of ministeriality and the express disposition in the Treaty of Tübingen, nor the distinction between former princely lackeys and officials of the state, is very comprehensible. More striking, however, is it that the ministry seems to have occasioned the exclusion of officials of the state.

Another closely related sphere of public business was indicated by the constitution of the former duchy, namely the court and council of the towns, from which the deputies to the diet were to be taken. Certainly a magistrate’s post is a suitable preparatory school for functions of the estates of the realm; persons of the magistracy live, like the officials, in the daily activity of helping to uphold civil order, and in the experience of how laws and institutions work, as also what counteractions of evil passions they have to combat and to withstand. Persons of the magistracy, furthermore, are themselves from the burgher estate, they share its more determinate interests, as they can also share its nearer trust. – Only, to be sure, from one end of Germany to the other the complaint of incapacity, sluggishness and indifference, – if not also of further depravity and badness, of the communal administrations had become so loud that their institution seemed above all to have needed a rebirth before men could be cultivated [in it] and issue from it who possessed capacity and trust for a larger sphere of action. The right of the magistrates to carry out for themselves the refilling of the posts falling vacant in them will well have been a principal circumstance that has brought them so low. What one might otherwise

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136