[p. 481]
|481| well call despotism, namely that many governments have taken from the town magistrates and other heads of communes the administration of communal property and of the other foundations and institutions belonging to churches, schools and poverty, may find in that incapacity not only its justification, but may rather have been able to show itself as an unavoidable duty. The same ground of incapacity it is that has also left, of the share which the magistrates as courts were supposed to have in the administration of justice, frequently no more than the mere formality, has brought the business and the decision into the hands of the princely heads of courts, the district officers, or has compelled recourse to be taken to legal opinions of consultants and advocates; the governments saw themselves likewise thereby occasioned not to leave the hitherto existing share in the administration of justice any longer in the hands of the magistrates.
Now if the town magistrates, according to their hitherto existing organisation and character, cannot precisely awaken any great hope for themselves of supplying capable deputies to the diet, this provision would nevertheless have deserved not to be wholly forgotten; but extending modifications would of course have to remedy the exaggerated and one-sided character of that restriction. The other extreme, equally going too far, however, we see in the royal constitution, that in the first place the eligibility as deputy is almost as good as unrestricted, and then in the second place that the conditions for being an elector are equally insignificant; – besides an age of 25 years there is required for this only a sum of property of 200 Fl. from landed estates.
This latter kind of conditions of the capacity to elect has hitherto been foreign to German institutions, and this idea has come into circulation only in more recent times; we
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