[p. 549]
|549| matter. Even if the negotiating committee had still wanted to persist in ignoring the royal constitution, by which a part of its articles was in part already settled, in part also better carried out and developed, it was now surely time for the assembly to deliberate, to bring the particular to consciousness and to declare what it found acceptable and what not. From that there would have resulted, at least, preliminary articles, and indeed of an agreement, not of a submission of the King. – But as little as the six articles were previously subjected to a discussion of the assembly, before they were laid down for preliminary unconditional acceptance, so little did this happen after the royal declaration on those articles and on the content of this declaration had been given. Instead, three or four members again read essays, namely in the form of projects of an answer to the royal resolution. The fixed idea of the dry principle of restoration of the old constitution grounded the naivety that the assembly always found itself outside the matter and even now busied itself not with it, but only with its own diplomatic manner of how it should be answered. – Dr. Cotta had read in the committee on 1 May an essay concerning the matter, which especially dealt with the establishment of a fund of the estates, then was drawn before the assembly and had as its consequence an essay by Dr. Weishaar (sitting of 27 May, Section VI, p. 38); later, on 23 June, he had another follow, in which the thought was developed that such a fund, like the other good of the old constitution in general, should not be extended to the elements encroaching upon the rights of rulers, and that fund should rather be restricted to what the credit of the state and the dignity of the estates permit. However well these thoughts, to which he also later returned, were suited to thorough deliberation before a resolution on the royal declaration, yet
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