[p. 506]
|506| – or as a landowner on whom a beneficial flood had laid a covering of fertile topsoil over the sandy ground he possessed, and who wanted to plough and farm his field in the same way as before.
One sees in the manner in which the estates of the realm summoned in Württemberg conducted themselves precisely the counterpart of what began 25 years ago in a neighbouring realm and what then resounded in all minds, namely that in a constitution of the state nothing should be recognised as valid except what is to be recognised according to the right of reason. One could have the apprehension that the leaven of the revolutionary principles of that time, of the abstract thoughts of freedom, had not yet finished fermenting and been digested in Germany, and that assemblies of estates would seize the opportunity to make similar attempts and to bring about confusions and dangers. Württemberg has indeed given the example, consoling even to this degree, that such an evil spirit haunts no more, but at the same time also that the immense experience which has been had in France and outside France, in Germany as much as there, was lost upon these estates of the realm, – the experience, namely, that the extreme of stiff persistence in the positive public law of a vanished condition and the opposite extreme of an abstract theory and of a shallow prattle have equally been the entrenchments of self-seeking and the sources of misfortune in that land and outside it. – The Württemberg estates of the realm have wanted to begin again on the standpoint on which the former estates of the realm found themselves; they did not enter into the content of the royal constitutional charter, and did not ask and seek to prove what and that something is rational right, but persisted outright in the formalism of demanding an old positive right on the ground that it had been positive and contractual. One had to regard the beginning of the French Revolution
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