Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 485]

|485| at the elections and eligibility itself are connected with the other institutions of the state, these circumstances exercise their influence of themselves; and if this is here legally ordained and, for example, for the capacity to be a member of a town magistracy, court, head and member of a corporation, guild and the like, a certain age, landed property and so on are required, this stands far more in proportion than when such dry, yet merely external conditions are set so abruptly over against the high interest of membership of the estates. – The guarantee which is sought through such conditions for the capability of those electing and elected is in any case partly of a negative kind, partly a mere presumption; whereas there is a wholly different, positive guarantee, through having been chosen, by the trust of the government, to services of the state or, by the trust of the communities and of fellow citizens, to communal services and offices and having been received into fellowships, further through actual activity and share in the organic life of state and people having acquired the skill as well as the sense of it, the sense of governing and obeying, and having given occasion that the electors could get to know and test the dispositions and capacity.

Provisions of that kind, which presuppose the people not as a state but rather as a heap, and then divide this according to number into particular heaps and according to age and a single determination of property into two classes in general, cannot properly be called institutions of the state. They do not suffice to take from the share of the people in the general affairs its democratic shapelessness and, more closely, to withdraw from contingency the purpose of obtaining capable deputies for an assembly of the land. An institution of the state cannot merely remain at the demand that something should happen, at the hope that it will happen, at the restriction of some circumstances which could make it difficult, – it

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