[p. 527]
|527| – which drawn-up petition had moreover been read out publicly once more in the assembly in the next sitting of 23 March and signed by the president, the vice-president, a holder of an individual vote and an elected deputy and the two secretaries – that the closing word “Assembly of Estates” was still missing in it. This defect was then removed by a supplementary petition. In the next royal resolution the assembly was instructed to remove, by an orderly conduct of business, the faults even of external form which had been noticeable in its petitions hitherto, to that end to keep to the conduct of business prescribed in the constitutional charter and in particular to elect a vice-president, likewise secretaries and the officials of the estates.
It would be too lengthy and too tedious to pursue further the pedantic course of these precautions. Although His Serene Highness the President repeatedly called upon the assembly to the elections of those officials, for whom the King had admittedly also prescribed the taking of oaths of office, and (Section III, p. 151) sought to bring it away from its constant “repetitions, leading no further, of propositions once uttered”, “from its procedural” lawyers’ course, and, since such an election could in any case take place without prejudice, reminded it “not to put the good itself at stake over clinging to forms and to the empty sound of the word“, they were far too persistent in their scrupulousness and shrewdness to let themselves be moved to such acts, insignificant for their claims, – if only their other acts had had more content and significance!
The more determinate assertion of the assembly of the estates of the land was that, in right, the old constitution had not perished and was not sublated, that it and the people could take the royal resolution, after the ceasing of the hitherto existing hindrances, to give a constitution only in the sense
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