[p. 496]
|496| rights be conceded to them. – Of the two prelates who were already members of the assembly of estates, the one, who had been summoned as chancellor of the University of Tübingen, declared that he did not know whether he represented the university or the church or the learned estate; the other, who had been summoned as evangelical general superintendent, made the naive remark that a good friend had advised him not to sign that petition of the other prelates, so as to appear impartial and to be able to support their cause all the more (II. Section, pp. 64 ff.).
The entire assembly of estates itself likewise places itself on a standpoint opposed to the actual relations of the world. It rejects the constitution given by the King and with it the instruction by virtue of which it is assembled, takes upon itself a vocation of its own, and resolves upon the non-acceptance of that constitution in a sense which contradicted the general constitution of Europe and of Germany, just newly founded by all the European powers. – The assembly of estates did not reject the royal constitution on the ground that it was contrary to the right which subjects can demand for themselves in the constitution of the state out of the eternal right of reason. What one had to expect it would let precede its rejection, an examination of that charter, it did not enter into at all, and it would surely have had to acknowledge the general principles of it; rather, it rejected it because it was not the old-Württemberg constitution, – and not even merely insofar as it differed from it; this examination too it did not send ahead, but dryly and expressly, because it was not precisely this former constitution, because the act through which it was to come into effect was not the mere restoration and revival of the old. – But the dead cannot revive; the assembly of estates proved in its demand that it had of the nature of the task
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