[p. 469]
|469| had to excuse oneself for such a moment of dwelling. For the occasions on which we have grown accustomed to see princely representation, the emptiness and inactivity of the former assembly of the state, the Diet of the Empire, in general the nullity and unreality of public life, have made such a vexation at acts of this kind, a moral and hypochondriac private conceit against the public and against the appearance of majesty, into the pervading mood, that the mention of it, and perhaps the view that such an appearance is capable of arousing magnanimous feelings, would run the risk of being taken for anything rather than seriousness, hardly for good nature, rather of being judged as courtly folly and slavish blindness and calculation. Our political deadness is incapable of taking delight in such scenes, and thoroughness turns away from them as mere externalities to the substance of the matter and to its own thoughts about it; and here too it is in the first instance the substance of the matter, the content of the constitutional charter which the king has given, that is briefly to be set out.
It consists of 66 paragraphs and falls into two parts, of which the first, of 46 §§, bears the title The Constitution of the Estates of the Realm, the second, of 20 §§, the title General Provisions in Relation to the Constitution of the Kingdom and the Rights and Obligations of the Royal Subjects, so that the one shows itself at once as the fuller, the other as the less developed.
Through the first, the king granted a representation of the estates with the following principal provisions: It is to consist of a) holders of individual votes (Virilstimmführer) and b) elected members, both in one chamber. The eligibility of the latter is bound to no estate; the servants in royal posts, non-commissioned officers and soldiers, clergymen, physicians and surgeons are excluded; the only further conditions are an age of 30 years,
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