[p. 508]
|508| wrong had been called right during these hundred years; further, that hundred-year-old and actual positive right rightly perishes when the basis falls away which is the condition of its existence. If one has the pleasure of threshing empty straw, one may assert that to the one spouse, even after the death of the other, his right to the other, and to the merchant whose ship has been swallowed by the sea his right to it, still remains. It has from of old been the sickness of the Germans to hang on to such formalism and to drive about with it. So also in this Württemberg assembly of estates nearly the whole content of its activity is confined, with an advocate’s obstinacy, to the unfruitful assertion of a formal right. In vain did a very few voices try to lead it to the matter itself, among others the president of the assembly, Herr Prince of Hohenlohe-Öhringen, to turn it occasionally from the procedural course, – for the mortar in which the time was pounded for 25 years had effected nothing upon them.
From this conduct of the estates of the realm, of keeping to the formalism of positive right and the standpoint of private law where the concern was with rational right and public law, it follows for the history of their proceedings of a year and a half that these are extremely empty of thoughts and for so great an object as that laid before them, the free constitution of a German state of the present time, contain little or almost nothing instructive. Instead of a fruitful labour, therefore, there presents itself almost only an external history, of which the main course is now to be given.
It has already been mentioned that after the King had solemnly opened the assembly of estates on 15 March 1815 and, having handed over the constitutional charter, had left it to itself, Count von Waldeck, no Old Württemberger,
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