[p. 464]
|464| not compared here, as the thoughts of one writer, say, with the thoughts of another, but a German government and a German people engaged in spiritual labour upon these objects and the thoughts occupied in the rebirth of an actuality.
The time had brought about for Württemberg a new task and the demand for its solution, the task of erecting the Württemberg lands into a state. After the nonsense of the arrangement which was called the German Empire, and which has been most correctly described, by a historian who was at least ingenious, as the constitution of anarchy, had at last reached its deserved end, shameful and in its outward manner too fitting to it, the former Württemberg received not only an enlargement by more than double its previous extent, but this whole, whose parts had previously been fiefs of the Empire, and the part that had made up the duchy also a Bohemian sub-fief, threw off this subordination, passed with the royal dignity of its prince into sovereignty and into the position of a state, – one of the actual German realms which take the place of the non-entity that had still borne only the empty name of an Empire.
Such epochs are extremely rare, and equally rare are the individuals to whom fate allotted the distinguished lot of founding states. The history of these few is for the most part lost in a grey antiquity and in a condition of wild, or at least still little cultivated, customs, where outwardly a state had indeed come into being, but the inner arrangement lay in the simple habits of the people and in the character of the chief. The historical origin of articulated constitutions is extended over a long series of centuries; to the few principal features that lay at the foundation, the need of the moment, the necessity and force of circumstances gave on each occasion, at some single point,
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