Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 531]

|531| – without examining it and without separating out what they could recognise and what not, and what they still missed -, has probably been the clumsiest, the most improper, the most unpardonable. In doing so they at the same time assumed, conversely, the position towards the King of demanding of him that he should accept, unexamined and unconditionally, the constitution which they and the people thought they wanted, indeed that an act of accepting no longer belonged to him at all, but that he was already in and for himself bound to it. It matters little that they seemed to be free of the presumption of wanting to make their own constitution themselves or of having made it, since it was the old-Württemberg constitution which they opposed to the royal one; they thereby merely submitted to the authority of something which in and for itself could no longer stand nor go, and of which they afterwards declared, naively enough (XI, p. 282), that it was quite impossible at present for them to state it in its full extent, – and why so? because the old archive of the estates was still being withheld from them! – That the bookish scholar is stranded when he has lost the key to his library is in order; but when the estates of the realm find it impossible to state their constitution because they do not have the archive at their disposal, what mouldy concept of constitution does this presuppose? But it is stated in the same place yet more closely what the sources are from which “the content of the fundamental laws of the constitution must be enumerated and developed”; this is characteristic enough to be singled out, namely not merely “from the Württemberg house and government ordinances, the recesses of the diets and committees, the testaments of the rulers”,

“but also from the various individual law-books, e.g. from the land law, the land ordinance, the so-called ordinances of all sorts, the ordinance on church and chest, the ordinance on marriage and matrimonial courts, the pulpit ordinance, the forest ordinance, the communal ordinance” etc.

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