Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 507]

|507| as the struggle which rational public law entered into with the mass of positive right and of privileges by which it had been suppressed; in the proceedings of the Württemberg estates of the realm we see the same struggle of these principles, only that the places are exchanged. If then the majority of the French estates of the realm and the popular party asserted and reclaimed the rights of reason and the government was on the side of the privileges, so in Württemberg it was rather the King who placed his constitution in the domain of rational public law; the estates of the realm, by contrast, set themselves up as defenders of the positive and of the privileges; indeed, they present the perverse spectacle that they do this in the name of the people, against whose interest those privileges are directed even more than against that of the prince.

Of the Württemberg estates of the realm one could say what has been said of the French returned émigrés: they have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing; they seem to have slept through these last 25 years, the richest that world history has perhaps had, and the most instructive for us, because our world and our representations belong to them. There could hardly have been a more formidable mortar for pounding to pieces the false concepts of right and the prejudices about constitutions than the judgement of these 25 years; but these estates of the realm have come out of it unscathed, as they were before. – Old right and old constitution are words as beautiful and great as it sounds sacrilegious to rob a people of its rights. But whether what is called old right and constitution is right or bad cannot depend on age; the abolition too of human sacrifice, of slavery, of feudal despotism and of countless infamies was always an abolition of something that was an old right. It has often been repeated that rights cannot be lost, that a hundred years of wrong cannot make a right, – one should have added: even if the hundred-year-old

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