[p. 468]
|468| that of support in his endeavours, and to the subjects of all classes that of a willing submission to the heavy burdens of the time and to the exertions of every kind through which security and preservation had been won,
he now declared that he laid the keystone to the edifice of the state, in that he gave his people a constitution.
After he had appealed to the representatives present, by whom the nation was called to unite with the head of the state in the exercise of the most important rights of governmental power,
and at the close had made the call: Let Us, united, for the furtherance of the affairs of the nation, to which the constitution summons this assembly, fortify the sacred bond between Me and my subjects with meeting confidence,
he had the constitutional charter proclaimed by the minister of the interior. After its reading he pledged himself upon it and with his own hand handed it to the president of the assembly.
There can surely be no greater worldly spectacle on earth than that a monarch should add to the power of the state, which in the first instance is wholly in his hands, a further and indeed the foundation, that he should take his people up into it as an essentially co-operating component. When otherwise one sees the great work of a constitution of the state, indeed most other acts of government, come about only in a series of fragmented actions and contingent events without survey and publicity, and the public appearance of princeliness and majesty had gradually confined itself to birthday celebrations or wedding festivities, one may be tempted to dwell a moment at that scene, where the appearance of majesty corresponds so well to the inner content of its action, as at a beneficent, sublime and corroborating intuition. But it would lie just as near to think that one
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