Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 467]

|467| and irrevocably could no longer be, – a persistence and a deception into which their Romans entered and by which the establishment of a rational, monarchical condition, whose concept the Romans had not yet found, was made impossible. – This policy might lie the closer to our princes if, from the experience of the last twenty-five years, they compared with one another the dangers and dreadfulnesses which attached to the creation of new constitutions and of an actuality proceeding from thought, and, on the other side, the danger-free repose and nullity into which the institutions of the former constitutions of the estates of the realm had reduced themselves, – if with this already present nullity they further combined the reflection how those institutions, in the wholly different relationship that had set in, like the Roman institutions which Augustus and Tiberius let stand, would lose altogether the little sense and consistency which they might still seem to have had in a German fief of the Empire.

King Frederick showed himself superior to the temptation of this deception. He summoned together for the 15th of March 1815 the heads of the princely and comital families of his realm and a selection from the rest of its nobility, likewise a number of popular deputies chosen by the citizens, and the history of these proceedings opens with the ever great scene in which the king, in full assembly of these estates of his realm, first delivered from the throne a speech to them, in which, after he had first expressed what had already been done, namely that the parts of the country and the subjects, previously so different, had been united into an inseparable whole, that the difference of religious confession and of estate had vanished in civil relation, that the public burdens had been brought into equal proportion for all and thus all had become citizens of one state, – then had rendered to his people the testimony of fidelity and obedience, to the army the testimony of bravery and of the honour brought to the name of Württemberg, to the servants of the state

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136