[p. 530]
|530| constitution which is given to it and that validity could be given to it in no other way than by the people accepting it with its will and insight; if it were not so, one may add, despotism, tyranny, infamy could put the people in whatever fetters it pleased. – And yet, in order to consider the matter from no other side than that of experience, one can appeal to this, partly that peoples themselves, and indeed among the most freedom-loving, have acknowledged their unskilfulness in giving themselves a constitution and commissioned a Solon, Lycurgus with it, which men moreover used a ruse in order to set aside the so-called will of the people and the declaration of this will on their constitution, – partly that Moses like Louis XVIII of his own accord gave the constitution and made not the will of the people but the divine or royal authority the ground of its validity. – With regard to Württemberg, however, the village mayor Reinhard of Obereßlingen cited above would have exhausted everything in his dictum: If the Swabians have free will, nothing happens at all. – As for the apprehension about despotic constitutions which might come out without consulting the will of the people, it may proceed from a well-founded distrust or from shallow worldly wisdom and fainthearted misjudgement of the true power of the spirit of the people and of the age; here it is not a matter of a hypothesis but of a determinate case. – As experience shows, so it is just as easy to see from the nature of the matter that no one can have less skill to make a constitution than what one may call the people, or than an assembly of its estates; even if one does not wish to consider that the existence of a people and of an assembly of estates already presupposes a constitution, an organic condition, an ordered life of the people.
The third course which the Württemberg estates of the realm adopted, namely to reject the royal constitution outright
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