[p. 514]
|514| and a full exposition of its motives precede its resolutions. But such a deliberation neither preceded nor followed the resolution; yet an assembly of estates is there not only so that it may not act without deliberation, but so that it may hold its deliberations on the interests of the state before the people and the world.
When some months later Herr Gleich, representative of Aalen, delivered a speech which was entirely opposed to the hitherto undeliberated presuppositions of the assembly, the committee which had to make a report on it put it to him that such a phenomenon must seem strange and arouse general disapproval in an assembly where concord and patriotic honesty had hitherto kept every foreign impure influence at a distance. What? A deputy who takes courage at last to let his dissenting opinion be heard aloud against this silent and dead unanimity must thereby expose himself to the allusion to foreign impure influence? In any case, the direct accusation of impurity, or complete abstention from mere insinuation, would have been more dignified. – Incidentally, right at the beginning of the committee’s report the purpose is attributed to Herr Gleich’s speech – or rather it is said that it seems to have the purpose – of forming an opposition party in the assembly so most gloriously characterised hitherto by concord. Whoever has reflected at all on the nature of an assembly of estates and is acquainted with its phenomena cannot fail to see that without opposition such an assembly is without outer and inner liveliness, that precisely such an antithesis within it belongs to its essence, to its justification, and that only when an opposition comes forward in it is it actually constituted; without one it has the shape only of a party or even of a lump.
The reporter has dwelt so long on the manner in which the assembly of estates
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