[p. 517]
|517| method. – A reading out of many sorts of treatises one after another cannot be called discussing. Rightly it is law in the English Parliament that the reading out of written addresses is not permitted, partly because such an essay can very easily be the work of another, but partly above all because the whole nature of such an assembly is thereby altered. Apart from a few speeches composed with a lively sense, though likewise read out, the present volumes of the proceedings consist chiefly of a collection of legal misgivings, of deductions larded with citations not merely from the litany of recesses of the diets, hereditary settlements, princely testaments etc., but also, for example, from the Corpus Iuris, Montesquieu, Zonaras4), [J. U. v.] Cramer in the treatise De tacente dissentiente (in Opuscula T. II, and in the Usus philosophiae Wolfianae in iure, spec. XII [1740]) and similar stately erudition, and of stillborn lawyers’ writings.
4) Editors: Johannes Zonaras, Byzantine writer, first half of the 12th century
If an assembly of estates represents the people, is such a manner of proceeding the way in which a people expresses itself, in which an assembly of this kind and a people itself is worked upon? Treatises composed in that manner in the study are also addressed only to studies or destined to be files for men of business. Assemblies of estates, however, have their essential public in the people; how can this take an interest in such paper proceedings and pedantic deductions and keep pace with them? Rather its representatives in such a way isolate themselves from one another and still more from the people itself and carry on the affairs of the people rather with its exclusion, even if the sittings were public. The physiognomy of the proceedings of the Württemberg assembly is in such a way not much different from that of the
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