Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 528]

|528| that the old one was to enter again into actuality. At the same time it demanded that the King should have its deliberation and approval obtained for ordinances which he issued during the assembling of the assembly; thus it demanded to exercise rights as actual old estates of the realm. So too it appointed no vice-president on the ground that this office was no institution of the Old Württemberg assembly of the estates of the land, but let itself be content with the presidency of His Highness the Prince of Hohenlohe-Öhringen, and with the voting together of the mediatized lords, likewise no institutions of the old constitution. – For its sole demand, made simpliciter, of the restoration of the old constitution it relied on the will of the people expressly declared at the elections and in a multitude of addresses submitted. – This is a great word; the representatives of the people have most to guard against profaning this word or using it lightly. What the truth was with the will of the New Württemberg people has already been mentioned. It has also been cited what a man of the people, the village mayor Reinhard, said, that so many, indeed most of the people, have too dull a feeling for love of the fatherland and for defence. But apart from this, it belongs to the hardest and therefore to the greatest thing that can be said of a human being that he knows what he wants. The reason that the first comers are not picked up from the people as representatives of the people, but the wisest are to be taken, is that it is not the people that knows it, but they that are to know it, what its true and actual will is, that is, what is good for it. How greatly they misjudge their dignity and vocation if in this they hold to the loud cry, and above all to so arid a cry as “old constitution“, indeed even want to rest on the petitions and addresses in this regard.

But if they placed in such a ground the nature of their whole authorisation and refused to recognise the royal

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