Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 497]

|497| that was to be solved not only no concept, but not even an inkling. It showed that it regarded the necessary element of the task as a whim and private arbitrary will of the King or of his ministry, and believed it had to do with a contingency, not with the nature of the matter. It did admit that some circumstances [were] new and that modifications would have to occur with regard to them. For these new circumstances it counted merely a couple of externalities which concerned the essence in the difference of the old and new relation as good as not at all, – namely the addition of an estate of the nobility, which, as noted above, wished to regard itself as not yet actually constituting a part of the subjects legally, hence in relation to the constitution, where the talk was solely of the condition of right, and which even declined to receive from the state, with the concurrence of the assembly of estates, the determination of a position in the Empire under public and private law. The other circumstance was the admission of the subjects belonging to another Christian confession to the same rights of citizenship of the state as the Lutherans, a circumstance which in any case did not concern the nature of the constitution, just as the former was not yet to be an object of it. As a further occasion for modifications the enlargement of the land by more than half over its previous extent was considered. In fact this circumstance could furnish a very important ground against the dry introduction of the former constitution of Old Württemberg, against which the assembly of estates sought, with advocates’ arguments from former cases, from the old positive public law, from the formal concept of incorporation, to prove that the newly added part has a right to the benefit of the constitution of the other part. Fundamentally considered, however, for the main point the whole consideration of this respect, and above all the advocates’ proofs, was something very idle, nearly a querelle d’Allemand; for even if Württemberg had received no enlargement at all

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