[p. 542]
|542| delicate, but rather absurd, intention for such a procedure it is stated that it was to open to the court a fitting way of acceding with good grace to the wishes of the assembly. – Equally remarkable is it to see from the speech cited that the committee had made a secret of these six points even from the assembly of the estates itself. It says in the same place that, after it became known that several members wanted to leave the diet out of dissatisfaction over this, a kind of confidential disclosure was made to them. – Above, the character of mutism was noted which the assembly showed from the very beginning; but now it was put by its committee, in addition, into the condition not of deafness – for only he is deaf who does not hear when there is speaking in his presence – but into the condition of not hearing because nothing was being spoken before it. – Here one loses altogether every idea one may have of the vocation and the labours of an assembly of estates. – It says in the same speech, as also emerges from the minutes, that the indispensable and sole thing that should have been done, “the discussion of these six articles in the assembly of the estates, was never and nevermore thought of”. – Thus the assembly had still not come to a material in its proceedings and to a substantial activity on the constitution.
The secret of the six preliminary articles of the committee, which now constitute the turning point, one learns to know only from an essay of the estates of 26 June (Section VIII, p. 89). Since they concern real materials, they shall be briefly cited here, together with the statement of what the King’s resolution of 29 May concedes on them and what is of the greatest importance.
The first thing which the commissioners demanded they called, very clumsily, self-taxation, with the more precise determination
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