[p. 532]
“From innumerable (!!) individual rescripts and chiefly from the many resolutions which were issued in reply to complaints, petitions and wishes of the estates.”
“Many important propositions can be demonstrated only by the combination of various sources of Württemberg public law, many only by induction, many only by the force of tradition confirmed in the laws.”
In the same address, further forward, the concern is expressed that without presupposing the continuing binding force of this positive constitution one would be led into the labyrinths of natural public law. But can there be a worse labyrinth than that mass of sources just indicated? An advocate may well feel merry at having such an armoury, from which to draw consequences, combinations, inductions, analogies for his deductions in abundance; but how can an assembly of estates be afraid of reason, the source of so-called natural public law, and seek help and security against such a fear in delving into such a paper labyrinth! If the estates, on the one hand, expected the King to recognise in advance, as rights of the Württemberg subjects, their consequences, combinations, inductions etc., to be brought to light from such sources within a year and a day (it says in the same place that it would be an undertaking of several years), they wanted, on the other hand, to maintain that this was the will of the people, which could not know such an edifice of constitution, one which the estates themselves declared it impossible for them to state!
One might, moreover, still have taken the view that the estates had not really been so much in earnest with their demand for the past constitution, and that they had had only the understanding intention of obtaining the alteration of some points of the royal constitution, chiefly a more comprehensive development of the principles, while at the same time seeking an effective means for the attainment of this purpose. One may concede that they could not resort to any
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