Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 465]

|465| a development and additions. The point of view around which the closer efforts of this formation turn is fairly simple; there are, on the one hand, the exertions of the government to subdue the power and the pretensions of the aristocratic intermediate member and to acquire for the state its rights against it; on the other hand, the exertions of the third estate, which is often also called, for itself, the people, to win and wrest civil rights for itself against the same intermediate power, and at times also against the government itself. Thus a constitution, surveyed as a whole, shows itself as an aggregate that has come into being, its development not having advanced uniformly, single parts having remained behind, others having been extended into disturbing excrescences, so that such a constitution resembles an old house whose simple basic form a long series of owners, according to the enlargements of the family and the need of the moment, have transformed into a collection of annexes and nooks, which have their individual conveniences, but together make up a shapeless and unintelligible whole. The spiritual cultivation of the time has the Idea of a state and with it of its essential unity, and a twenty-five-year actuality, just now run out, for the most part dreadful, has given the intuition of the manifold attempts to grasp the Idea, and a costly, complete experience. The favour of circumstances finally granted to the ruler of Württemberg for this purpose also the third thing, the external conditions, and besides the distinguished advantage that he did not find the aristocratic middle estate already fixed as an obstacle in a privileged landed nobility, but that this element seemed only now to be taken up. The king seemed hereby to have been placed upon the standpoint, unique in history, of being able to give a constitution cast in one piece.

Of the sovereignty obtained, the one side, the existence and recognition of the new Württemberg state outwardly, had been accomplished. The first time of its coming into being had fallen

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