[p. 525]
|525| could here have proved its magic power, how the estates could refrain, under such hard external and internal circumstances, from bringing about united help in deed. – Likewise it has further been sufficiently shown that the Old Württemberg constitution exerted no magic power at all on the newer subjects – more than half of the land -, that they regarded what they had got to enjoy of it rather as a kind of plague, as the worst scourge of the land, – as will be stated further on. Otherwise, however, the whole course of the proceedings of the estates may well be regarded as a history of the magic power of that name, to which power the assembly had surrendered itself right from the beginning without going into the matter; – or rather, what kind of matter formerly lay hidden under that name has already been touched on above in mentioning the housekeeping of the estates’ treasury, and the citation still to be made of the depressing scourge of the land will yield something further. In the present case it is the black magic of the word which let the words, to be ready to sacrifice goods and blood for the good cause, come to nothing further than remaining words. – Of this magic power the estates state more closely that nothing secures the fatherland so certainly against the poison of the dangerous principles, which are now spread again from France as 25 years ago; – it has been remarked above that that power has preserved the estates not only from the poison of the past 25 years but also, so to speak, still much more from the rational concepts of them.
As to the closer sides of the position which the estates gave themselves, in rejecting the royal constitution on the ground of which they were assembled they were in uncertainty whether they existed at all or not. Consistently they should, after the announcement made by the King, have dissolved at once and dispersed
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