[p. 462]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
[Review of the] Proceedings in the Assembly of the Estates of the Kingdom of W\u00fcrttemberg in the Years 1815 and 1816. XXXIII Instalments.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel\u2019s review of the W\u00fcrttemberg constitutional proceedings, published in 1817 in the \u201cHeidelbergische Jahrb\u00fccher der Literatur\u201d (nos. 66\u201368 and 73\u201377). Translated from the German text of the Werke (vol. 4, \u201cN\u00fcrnberger und Heidelberger Schriften\u201d).<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Print version (PDF):<\/strong> for printing and taking along<\/a> \u2013 each page of the PDF holds exactly one page of the printed edition, with a wide margin for one\u2019s own notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The figures between vertical bars, e.g. |93|<\/span>, mark the beginning of a page of the printed edition, so that a passage can be found again in one\u2019s own copy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the notes, \u201cEditors:<\/em>\u201d introduces a note by the editors of the German edition and \u201cHegel\u2019s footnote.\u201d one of Hegel\u2019s own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cross-reference:<\/em> The review in which Hegel settles the question that returns in \u00a7 3<\/a> Remark: whether the old right<\/em> of a country holds against a rational constitution. On the estates element and representation \u00a7 301<\/a> ff., on the election of deputies \u00a7 308<\/a> and \u00a7 311<\/a>, on levies \u00a7 299<\/a>, and on the question who makes the constitution the Remark to \u00a7 273<\/a>. Akin to it is his examination of the English Reform Bill<\/a> of 1831. The German text<\/a> is on the German side of this edition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Page by page:<\/strong> Each web page holds exactly one page of the printed edition. Web page 1 is p. 462, web page 2 is p. 463, and so on; the web page for a printed page thus has the number \u201cprinted page minus 461\u201d. The page number stands at the top of each web page in square brackets. The first and the last page are printed only in part, because the text there begins or ends in the middle of a page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Find a page:<\/strong> The business begun two and a half years ago, of completing a German monarchy, which we have seen come into being in our times, through the introduction of a representative constitution, has from its very beginning aroused so general an interest among the German public that nothing more agreeable could have happened for that public than that the proceedings of the W\u00fcrttemberg assembly of estates<\/em> have been made publicly known. In place of the hopes<\/em> which accompanied the beginning and the progress, there must at the close appear outcome<\/em> and judgement<\/em>. The 33 issues to which this consideration is in the first instance confined do indeed not yet contain the completion of the principal purpose, but they form a historical whole in so far as, on the one hand, they present the course of events up to the death of the king who founded the monarchy and also began the second step, that of its inner free constitution, and as the peculiar development of this event could, in its principal features, be regarded as belonging to his government; – on the other hand, the work on the part of the estates appears as something completed, in so far as a committee commissioned by them for this purpose has finished with its draft<\/em> of a constitution, which has likewise appeared in print.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These proceedings, furthermore, present chiefly only<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 463]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |463|<\/span> the one side<\/em> of the labours of that attempt, namely the public labours<\/em>, so far as they enter the assembly of estates; the inner history of the labours of the cabinet and of the ministry, as well as what went on outside the assembly among the people, the possible external purposes and activities of the members of the estates, in general whatever one is otherwise accustomed to reckon as belonging to the secret connection<\/em> of events and actions, is concealed here. The interest of the public, however, has of itself been directed chiefly to the public part of the proceedings, which in any case has chiefly the character of furnishing the worthy materials of history. The so-called secret springs and intentions of individuals, anecdotes and subjective influences were held to be the most important thing in a psychological<\/em> view of history that was still fashionable a short time ago. This view, however, has now fallen into discredit, and history strives once more after its dignity, to present the nature and course of the substantial matter and to make known the characters of the persons acting from what they do<\/em>; the conviction has become more general that neither the matter nor the characters in their solidity issue from contingencies or can be known from them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The historical events that we see before us here have the peculiar charm that they do not contain so considerable a portion of what is past<\/em> as a history of more distant times; the great purposes and interests, like the lesser peculiarities and externalities, are still present. The concepts<\/em> concerning the object of interest which we must bring to this event we may not demand of any more remote age, not even of cultivated Greece and Rome; they are peculiar to our time. Then we see these ideas about the constitution of the state, and in particular about the admission of a share in it, whereby the people is granted an influence upon it and a public life,<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 464]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |464|<\/span> not compared here, as the thoughts<\/em> of one writer, say, with the thoughts of another, but a German government and a German people engaged in spiritual labour upon these objects and the thoughts occupied in the rebirth of an actuality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The time had brought about for W\u00fcrttemberg a new task and the demand for its solution, the task of erecting the W\u00fcrttemberg lands into a state<\/em>. After the nonsense of the arrangement which was called the German Empire<\/em>, and which has been most correctly described, by a historian who was at least ingenious, as the constitution of anarchy<\/em>, had at last reached its deserved end, shameful and in its outward manner too fitting to it, the former W\u00fcrttemberg received not only an enlargement by more than double its previous extent, but this whole, whose parts had previously been fiefs of the Empire, and the part that had made up the duchy also a Bohemian sub-fief, threw off this subordination, passed with the royal dignity of its prince into sovereignty and into the position of a state, – one of the actual German realms<\/em> which take the place of the non-entity that had still borne only the empty name of an Empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such epochs are extremely rare, and equally rare are the individuals to whom fate allotted the distinguished lot of founding states. The history of these few is for the most part lost in a grey antiquity and in a condition of wild, or at least still little cultivated, customs, where outwardly a state had indeed come into being, but the inner arrangement lay in the simple habits of the people and in the character of the chief. The historical origin of articulated constitutions is extended over a long series of centuries; to the few principal features that lay at the foundation, the need of the moment, the necessity and force of circumstances gave on each occasion, at some single point,<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 465]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |465|<\/span> a development and additions. The point of view around which the closer efforts of this formation turn is fairly simple; there are, on the one hand, the exertions of the government to subdue the power and the pretensions of the aristocratic intermediate member and to acquire for the state its rights against it; on the other hand, the exertions of the third estate, which is often also called, for itself, the people, to win and wrest civil rights for itself against the same intermediate power, and at times also against the government itself. Thus a constitution, surveyed as a whole, shows itself as an aggregate that has come into being, its development not having advanced uniformly, single parts having remained behind, others having been extended into disturbing excrescences, so that such a constitution resembles an old house whose simple basic form a long series of owners, according to the enlargements of the family and the need of the moment, have transformed into a collection of annexes and nooks, which have their individual conveniences, but together make up a shapeless and unintelligible whole. The spiritual cultivation of the time has the Idea<\/em> of a state and with it of its essential unity, and a twenty-five-year actuality, just now run out, for the most part dreadful, has given the intuition of the manifold attempts to grasp the Idea, and a costly, complete experience. The favour of circumstances finally granted to the ruler of W\u00fcrttemberg for this purpose also the third thing, the external conditions, and besides the distinguished advantage that he did not find the aristocratic middle estate already fixed as an obstacle in a privileged landed nobility, but that this element seemed only now to be taken up. The king seemed hereby to have been placed upon the standpoint, unique in history, of being able to give a constitution cast in one piece<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of the sovereignty obtained, the one side, the existence and recognition of the new W\u00fcrttemberg state outwardly<\/em>, had been accomplished. The first time of its coming into being had fallen<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 466]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |466|<\/span> into circumstances in which everything had to be imperiously mustered for the external establishment and preservation, and inwardly, therefore, the means had to be gathered together by a vigorous ministerial government and made ready for use in a firm hand. Now the time had come when not merely the power<\/em> of the state but also its will<\/em> could become alive. The good fortune and the exertions of the European governments and their peoples had succeeded in freeing the sovereignty of the German realms from the restriction under which it still lay, and thereby in bringing about the possibility of in the first place promising<\/em> free constitutions to the peoples. A higher necessity, however, than lies in the positive bond of a promise lies in the nature of the concepts that have become a general conviction, which attach to a monarchy the determination of a representative constitution, of a lawful condition, and of an influence of the people upon legislation. – Frederick II now also took this second step, of creating the monarchical state inwardly<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The promise could be fulfilled in a way which might be held to be the shrewdest, and even be given out as the most rightful, but which would have been the most perfidious counsel<\/em> that the ministers could have given. If the princes of the new realms had wished to deceive their peoples quite thoroughly and to acquire honour, so to speak, before God and men, they would have given back to their peoples the so-called old constitutions; – honour before God<\/em> and the world<\/em> – for, after so many public voices and in particular also after the history before us, one might think that the peoples would have streamed into the churches and sung loud Te Deums. – For the shades of Machiavelli<\/em> the princes would have won the fame of the fine policy of the Augusti<\/em> and the Tiberii<\/em>, who likewise let the forms of the preceding condition, at that time a republic, continue to stand, while the thing itself was no longer<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 467]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |467|<\/span> and irrevocably could no longer be, – a persistence and a deception into which their Romans entered and by which the establishment of a rational, monarchical condition, whose concept the Romans had not yet found, was made impossible. – This policy might lie the closer to our princes if, from the experience of the last twenty-five years, they compared with one another the dangers and dreadfulnesses which attached to the creation of new constitutions and of an actuality proceeding from thought, and, on the other side, the danger-free repose and nullity into which the institutions of the former constitutions of the estates of the realm had reduced themselves, – if with this already present nullity they further combined the reflection how those institutions, in the wholly different relationship that had set in, like the Roman institutions which Augustus and Tiberius let stand, would lose altogether the little sense and consistency which they might still seem to have had in a German fief of the Empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n King Frederick showed himself superior to the temptation of this deception. He summoned together for the 15th of March 1815 the heads of the princely and comital families of his realm and a selection from the rest of its nobility, likewise a number of popular deputies chosen by the citizens, and the history of these proceedings opens with the ever great scene in which the king, in full assembly of these estates of his realm, first delivered from the throne a speech to them, in which, after he had first expressed what had already been done, namely that the parts of the country and the subjects, previously so different, had been united into an inseparable whole, that the difference of religious confession and of estate had vanished in civil relation, that the public burdens had been brought into equal proportion for all and thus all had become citizens of one state<\/em>, – then had rendered to his people the testimony of fidelity and obedience, to the army the testimony of bravery and of the honour brought to the name of W\u00fcrttemberg, to the servants of the state<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 468]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |468|<\/span> that of support in his endeavours, and to the subjects of all classes that of a willing submission to the heavy burdens of the time and to the exertions of every kind through which security and preservation had been won,<\/p>\n\n\n\n he now declared that he laid the keystone<\/em> to the edifice of the state, in that he gave his people a constitution<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After he had appealed to the representatives present, by whom the nation was called to unite with the head of the state in the exercise of the most important rights of governmental power<\/em>,<\/p>\n\n\n\n and at the close had made the call: Let Us, united<\/em>, for the furtherance of the affairs of the nation, to which the constitution summons this assembly, fortify the sacred bond between Me and my subjects<\/em> with meeting confidence<\/em>,<\/p>\n\n\n\n he had the constitutional charter<\/em> proclaimed by the minister of the interior. After its reading he pledged<\/em> himself upon it and with his own hand handed<\/em> it to the president of the assembly<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There can surely be no greater worldly spectacle on earth than that a monarch should add to the power of the state, which in the first instance is wholly in his hands, a further and indeed the<\/em> foundation, that he should take his people up into it as an essentially co-operating component. When otherwise one sees the great work of a constitution of the state, indeed most other acts of government, come about only in a series of fragmented actions and contingent events without survey and publicity, and the public appearance of princeliness and majesty had gradually confined itself to birthday celebrations or wedding festivities, one may be tempted to dwell a moment at that scene, where the appearance of majesty corresponds so well to the inner content of its action, as at a beneficent, sublime and corroborating intuition. But it would lie just as near to think that one<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 469]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |469|<\/span> 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<\/em> which the king has given, that is briefly to be set out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It consists of 66 paragraphs and falls into two parts, of which the first, of 46 \u00a7\u00a7, bears the title The Constitution of the Estates of the Realm<\/em>, the second, of 20 \u00a7\u00a7, the title General Provisions in Relation to the Constitution of the Kingdom and the Rights and Obligations of the Royal Subjects<\/em>, so that the one shows itself at once as the fuller, the other as the less developed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Through the first, the king granted a representation of the estates<\/em> with the following principal provisions: It is to consist of a) holders of individual votes<\/em> (Virilstimmf\u00fchrer) and b) elected members<\/em>, both in one chamber<\/em>. The eligibility<\/em> 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,<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 470]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |470|<\/span> and besides, to belong to one of the three Christian confessions; the possession of a certain property is not included among the conditions. – For the quality of an elector<\/em> there are required a net yield of 200 gulden from landed estates and an age of 25 years. The estates assemble<\/em> only upon summons by the king, and necessarily every three years, after which time half of the elected representatives retire, yet are eligible again and are replaced by new elections. The assembly lasts not beyond six weeks and is dismissed, adjourned or wholly dissolved by the king. The elected deputies, including the chancellor of the university, the Protestant general superintendent and the Catholic dean, receive their travelling expenses paid<\/em> and daily allowances<\/em> (of 5 Fl. 30 Kr.). The ministers may attend the assembly at any time. – In the years in which the assembly of estates is not convened, a committee<\/em> of 12 members elected by it for three years assembles for the dispatch of urgent affairs; an increase of the levies or an alteration of legislation, however, is not within its competence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the introduction<\/em> of new taxes, of direct as well as indirect levies, and for their collection<\/em>, the consent of the estates is necessary; the existing levies remain as foundations for the government of the then king. The calculation of the revenues and the application of the levies is laid before the estates every year. The determination of a civil list<\/em> for the king is left to further proceedings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The estates have an equal share in legislation<\/em>; without their assent no new general law concerning personal freedom and property or the constitution can be promulgated. The initiative<\/em> belongs in this to the king; the estates, however, may submit proposals of laws<\/em> to the king as wishes, in case of a refusing answer repeat them three times in future assemblies<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 471]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |471|<\/span> and, upon the last answer, which must be motivated, make new representations with regard to the motives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The estates are further permitted to lay before the king general wishes, representations and complaints, – and the king promises to give a resolution upon every submission of the estates, and also to accept the complaints brought to them by individual subjects, if it is certified that the authorities of the state have refused to accept them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, the estates can demand the ordering of an investigation against royal officials of the state, and upon the consent, which is never to be refused by the king, judgement is to be pronounced, in the case of high treason and of concussion, by a court of the estates, in other cases by the ordinary course of law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The infinite importance and liberality of the rights which are here granted to the estates of the realm, as well as the simplicity and openness of these provisions, considered impartially, merely according to their content and without any other regard<\/em>, certainly do the highest honour to the prince who gave them, as well as to the time in which the right of the state has purified itself of privileges and has matured to principles, and such a work gains still more by comparison with the shapelessness, narrow-heartedness and obscurity through which, in constitutions at home and abroad, namely in the old-W\u00fcrttemberg one, rights of the people are often veiled and stunted in privileges and particularities, restricted and equivocal, indeed often made wholly into an empty semblance. Are the provisions cited not such foundations of a constitution as cannot be otherwise than recognised and accepted with the highest assent? What might be missed<\/em> cannot be something that would be opposed<\/em> to them, but only additions and more developed provisions, yet only in conformity with those general truths of a condition of the right of the state. What still stems from the positive<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 472]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |472|<\/span> right of the state is chiefly only the privilege of the aristocratic institution. Besides, however, that the rational right of the state has come back from the democratic abstractions which reject such an institution altogether, the privilege of this actuality, given in any case, has been set very far from the former feudal right in general by further statutes. – Here it deserves in the first instance only to be singled out that to this element in the royal constitutional charter, which is united with the elected deputies in one chamber<\/em>, only 50 votes were granted, to the latter by contrast 73 votes, hence a considerable preponderance. This relation of political power departs widely from that which enters with the system of two chambers and which, by its more general introduction and its age alone, has important authority. The contrast of that proportion of votes with the one adopted in the provisional assembly of estates of the Kingdom of Hanover<\/em>, where to the knightly estate one<\/em> vote more than to the burgher estate had been assigned, may be cited in passing because the W\u00fcrttemberg estates in the following proceedings have several times provoked the liberal utterances of the Hanoverian legation at the Congress in Vienna concerning German constitutional affairs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More unexpected still could seem the further extension and almost complete unboundedness which has been given to the democratic principle<\/em> by the manner of electing the representatives, so that this element enters into the order of the state in an almost wholly loose form. The few tempering features that show themselves here, after the holders of individual votes have already not been set over against it in a chamber of their own, are roughly the provisions that the electoral assemblies are presided over by the royal district officers (Oberamtleute) and in the good towns by the bailiffs (Landv\u00f6gte), that the persons drawn in for the business of the election, such as the district clerk<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 473]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |473|<\/span> and his substitute, are not eligible in the very district in which they have this function; in other districts, however, they are. The capacity to be elected a representative is, as cited above, restricted to very few conditions. In the first place all servants of the state<\/em> and clergymen<\/em>, as also the physicians and surgeons, are excluded. The consideration which probably excluded the latter two classes may also have been taken with the former, namely that their official functions permit them no longer absence and other occupation. Apart from the fact that this would also be the case with the holders of individual votes who stand in royal offices, in so far as it is presumably not supposed that they are each time to let themselves be represented by others, and then that, with those employed in the place of the assembly of estates, which will as a rule be the capital, this ground is diminished, this consideration is certainly not significant enough to justify a disposition so extremely important for the main matter. Even in the draft of the basic features of the new constitution of the estates<\/em>, with whose composition the king himself had occupied himself (see Supplement of Documents, p. 5) and which he had handed over, in a speech delivered in the assembled council of state on the 11th of January 1815, to a special commission of councillors of state and senior officials for deliberation, there occurs the provision (see p. 8) that the royal servants also, in so far as their service relations permit, are eligible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reviewer wishes to expand at greater length upon this subject, which is of great importance. – Even this circumstance must not here be overlooked, that in great states, such as France for example and still more England, the whole social condition within and the far-reaching connection without place individuals in wholly different relationships of wealth, of culture and of habit, of living and conducting themselves in more general interests, than in a country of greater narrowness<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 474]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |474|<\/span> of extent, of social condition and of wealth. In such smaller countries the greater part of those who acquire a scientific, in general a more universal cultivation will see themselves induced to seek their economic and social existence in the service of the state; there will therefore, when the servants of the state have been subtracted, be found out of proportion fewer who bring into an assembly of estates a considerable insight and experience in general affairs, – in any case still fewer who could be called statesmen<\/em>. The nobility has already been in part taken away among the holders of individual votes, another part of it will be found in royal service; in general, for the places of the deputies to be elected, the nobility was not reckoned with; on the contrary. The estate of advocates<\/em>, which among the remaining estates can come into consideration chiefly, is, in its concepts and business in the first instance, bound to the principles of private right, and moreover of positive<\/em> right, which are opposed to the principles of the right of the state, that is of the rational, of which alone there can be talk in a rational constitution, – so that the sense of a statesman all too famous hit the mark rightly in this when he declared advocates the most unskilful at counselling and acting in public affairs. How the spirit of advocates has worked in the history of the W\u00fcrttemberg assembly of estates will show itself in what follows. – The legal exclusion of this estate could well be contradicted from the side of abstract right, yet not more than the exclusion of physicians and surgeons; a organisation of the state, however, rests upon a wholly different concrete wisdom than a formalism abstracted from private right. A quite peculiar structure of the old-W\u00fcrttemberg condition, which is of the first importance for the constitution of the estates there, the estate of scribes<\/em> (Schreiberstand), we shall come to know in the sequel. The contribution which the estate<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 475]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |475|<\/span> of merchants, tradespeople, and other owners of property can furnish for an assembly of estates, important as it is, cannot for this purpose be in so numerous a proportion as in England, say, and cannot by itself replace what is lost through the exclusion of the officials of the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As important as this exclusion already is through the diminution of the material from which capable deputies can be taken, so much more important is it for the element of disposition, which must be the preponderant one in an assembly of estates if it is not to turn into the most dangerous evil that is possible in a state. This fundamental quality can in general be called the sense of the state<\/em>. It is not disposed of with abstract insight, nor with mere rectitude and a good disposition for the welfare of the whole and the best of individuals. Owners of landed property, but equally also the individuals engaged in trades and otherwise in possession of a property or a skill, have the interest of the preservation of civil order, but the direct<\/em> element of their purpose in this is the private<\/em> element of their possession. If deputies of the estates of the realm bring with them the sense of private interest and private right as their first purpose, upon which the rest is to depend and of which it is to be a consequence, then they set out to haggle off as much as possible from the state and to find it superfluous, if otherwise not inexpedient, yet for their purpose not indispensably necessary, and they come altogether with the will to give as little as possible<\/em> and to do as little as possible<\/em> for the universal. – There is no question of what dispositions deputies can<\/em> have, from whatever estate or relationship they are taken; in arrangements of the state, as in every rational institution, the contingent<\/em> may not be reckoned with, but the question can only be what the nature of the matter<\/em>, here of the estate, brings with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sense of the state, however, is acquired chiefly in the<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 476]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |476|<\/span> habitual occupation<\/em> with the general affairs, in which not only is the infinite worth which the universal has in itself felt and recognised, but also the experience of the resistance, the hostility and the dishonesty of private interest<\/em>, and the struggle with it, in particular with its obstinacy in so far as it has fixed itself in the form of right, is gone through. Since the deputies are elected, it is an essential consideration that the electors should proceed chiefly from such relationships in which this sense must be present and in which it is formed. The former minister of the interior in France, Vaublanc<\/em>, took into his draft of a law for the manner of election of the chamber of deputies directly the provision that the royal officials of every kind, together with the clergy, in the departments should make up the majority of the electors. There is agreement on this, that the English constitution is maintained through that alone which is called its abuses<\/em>, namely through the wholly unequal and therefore unjust, indeed in part quite senseless privileges in respect of the rights of election, by which alone, however, it becomes possible that the government can in general reckon on the majority of votes. – It is an opinion of the uninstructed, in this connection, to regard the opposition party as a party against the government<\/em> or against the ministry<\/em> as such; if the opposition attacks not merely individual ministerial measures, which is also done by the independent members who otherwise in the main vote with the ministry, but combats it in each and every respect, its struggle goes only against this particular ministry<\/em>, not against the government and against the ministry in general. What is often reproached to them as something bad, namely that they only want to get into the ministry themselves, is precisely their greatest justification, quite the contrary of the tendency which one often sees praised in German estates of the realm or individuals as bravery<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 477]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |477|<\/span> of freedom and defence of the citizens and their rights, – the tendency to win and haggle away from the state as much as possible of means for themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It must be left to German history to show how far the appearance of the former so-called third estate in the diets had its origin in the relationship of ministeriality<\/em>, in which the heads of the towns had stood as princely officials, and how far, through entry into this relationship, the burgher councillors afterwards also obtained a share in membership of the estates of the realm; likewise how the original officials were at first merely deliberative and only in the course of time became decisive in their votes. – In the Treaty of T\u00fcbingen of 1514, which is regarded as the fundamental law in the constitution of the former Duchy of W\u00fcrttemberg, the princely officials, together with one from the court and one from the council<\/em> of a town, are expressly named as those who are to make up the deputies of the country (Landschaft) at the diets. – Yet already six years afterwards, in the year 1520, the estates of the realm brought it about, before the imperial commissioners, that the officials were weeded out again; the estates thereby give a poor example of the immutability of treaties just solemnly concluded. – Very near at hand lies the objection against the eligibility of officials as deputies, that they, as in the service of the prince, will naturally<\/em> also speak and act in his interest, whereby the thought perhaps slips in that what is in the interest of the prince is against<\/em> the interest of the people and of the state. In any case service at the person<\/em> of the prince, court offices<\/em>, is something different from the service<\/em> which is rendered to the government<\/em> and to the state<\/em>, and the opinion that what happens in the interest of the government and of the state is against<\/em> the interest of the people distinguishes the rabble from citizens. – The most recent events of the world, the struggle for<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 478]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |478|<\/span> Germany’s independence, have instilled in the German youth at the universities a higher interest than the mere direction upon the immediate future acquisition of bread and upon provision; it has also bled in part for the purpose that the German countries should receive free constitutions, and has brought with it from the battlefield the hope of a future further working for this and of an efficacy in the political life of the state. Since it procures for itself the capacity for this through scientific training and devotes itself chiefly to the service of the state, is it, like the whole scientifically cultivated estate, which for the most part gives itself the same vocation, for this very reason to lose the capacity to become members of estates of the realm, representatives of the people?<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is here still the important circumstance to be taken into consideration, that the change in the relationship of the former princely servants<\/em> constitutes a significant moment in the transition of Germany from earlier shapelessness and barbarism to the rational condition of a life of the state<\/em>. – Something on this circumstance can be cited from the appendix to the 25th part of the proceedings; there, p. 25, it is mentioned with regard to the thirteenth and the following centuries that the chamber offices were at first entrusted for the most part only to persons of the knightly estate, with a receipt of considerable revenues from landed estates and from the prestations of the subjects, who, however, found a pretext for giving up the exercise of the office, which had become burdensome, and for having it administered by an administrator (Pflegverweser) from the burgher estate, with an allotment of a lesser enjoyment. Later these, like the bailiff, judicial and other offices, were transferred merely to persons of the burgher estate, who, however, regarded this not, as later, as a favour but as a great burden, and had to accept it; nor was this burden forced upon anyone for too long; it counted as a special favour to be spared such offices,<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 479]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |479|<\/span> – of which several examples are cited in the same place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the relationship of these ministeriales, then, at least, even though otherwise a vassalage and even something of a bondage lies in it, the other circumstances dropped away, according to which one could believe them to be for the interest of the prince, against<\/em> the people, in the sense in which princely servants<\/em> were later taken roughly for princely lackeys<\/em> and for a class excluded from the people. This latter position they had in so far as the revenues which they had to collect and to account for, as also the judicial and police power which they had to exercise in the name of the prince, counted more as rights of a private possession<\/em> and of the private power<\/em> of a third party against the citizens than as revenues of the state and duties of the state. But as the domanial possession and the family<\/em> entails of the princely families have in later times approached ever more the character of property of the state<\/em>, and the bailiff’s and other rights over subject and bondage people have begun to pass over into the more rational character of duty of the state<\/em> and power of the state<\/em>, so the princely servants too have come, beyond the dependence of their salaries upon arbitrary will<\/em>, to rights in their offices and to the dignity of servants of the state<\/em>. This transition from the administration of a private possession into the administration of rights of the state<\/em> is one of the most important which has been introduced by time, and which has also no longer left the relationship of the officials in the determination which held at the time of the former W\u00fcrttemberg constitution; – it is one of the changes which then became fixed and completed with the general transition of a non-sovereign principality into a state. – Since the positive right of the state, which the assembly of estates chiefly made the basis of its claims, has history for its basis, the general remark may be appended here that it is precisely history<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 480]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |480|<\/span> which teaches us to recognise the circumstances under which a provision of a constitution was rational, and here gives, for example, the result that, if the exclusion of royal officials from the estates of the realm was rational in earlier times, it is no longer so now under other circumstances. – That the assembly of estates recalled neither the old relationship of ministeriality and the express disposition in the Treaty of T\u00fcbingen, nor the distinction between former princely lackeys and officials of the state, is very comprehensible. More striking, however, is it that the ministry seems to have occasioned the exclusion of officials of the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another closely related sphere of public business was indicated by the constitution of the former duchy, namely the court and council<\/em> of the towns, from which the deputies to the diet were to be taken. Certainly a magistrate’s post is a suitable preparatory school for functions of the estates of the realm; persons of the magistracy live, like the officials, in the daily activity of helping to uphold civil order, and in the experience of how laws and institutions work, as also what counteractions of evil passions they have to combat and to withstand. Persons of the magistracy, furthermore, are themselves from the burgher estate, they share its more determinate interests, as they can also share its nearer trust. – Only, to be sure, from one end of Germany to the other the complaint of incapacity, sluggishness and indifference, – if not also of further depravity and badness, of the communal administrations had become so loud that their institution seemed above all to have needed a rebirth before men could be cultivated [in it] and issue from it who possessed capacity and trust for a larger sphere of action. The right of the magistrates to carry out for themselves the refilling of the posts falling vacant in them will well have been a principal circumstance that has brought them so low. What one might otherwise<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 481]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |481|<\/span> well call despotism, namely that many governments have taken from the town magistrates and other heads of communes the administration of communal property and of the other foundations and institutions belonging to churches, schools and poverty, may find in that incapacity not only its justification, but may rather have been able to show itself as an unavoidable duty. The same ground of incapacity it is that has also left, of the share which the magistrates as courts were supposed to have in the administration of justice, frequently no more than the mere formality, has brought the business and the decision into the hands of the princely heads of courts, the district officers, or has compelled recourse to be taken to legal opinions of consultants and advocates; the governments saw themselves likewise thereby occasioned not to leave the hitherto existing share in the administration of justice any longer in the hands of the magistrates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now if the town magistrates, according to their hitherto existing organisation and constitution, cannot precisely awaken any great hope for themselves of supplying capable deputies to the diet, this provision would nevertheless have deserved not to be wholly forgotten; but extending modifications would of course have to remedy the exaggerated and one-sided character of that restriction. The other extreme, equally going too far, however, we see in the royal constitution, that in the first place<\/em> the eligibility as deputy is almost as good as unrestricted, and then in the second place that the conditions for being an elector<\/em> are equally insignificant; – besides an age of 25 years there is required for this only a sum of property of 200 Fl. from landed estates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This latter kind of conditions of the capacity to elect has hitherto been foreign to German institutions, and this idea has come into circulation only in more recent times; we<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 482]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |482|<\/span> wish to remark something upon it. What is first striking in it is that, according to such dry, abstract determinations as the two cited, the electors otherwise appear in no association and relation to civil order and to the organisation of the whole of the state. The citizens appear as isolated atoms and the electoral assemblies as unordered, inorganic aggregates, the people in general dissolved into a heap<\/em>, – a shape in which the commonwealth, where it undertakes an action, should never show itself; it is the most unworthy of it and the most contradictory to its concept of being a spiritual order. For age<\/em>, and likewise property<\/em>, are qualities which concern merely the individual for himself<\/em>, not attributes which make up his standing in civil order<\/em>. Such a standing he has only by virtue of an office, an estate, a civilly recognised skill in a trade and entitlement according to it, mastership, title and so on. – The popular conception is so familiar with such standing that one says of a man only then that he is something<\/em> when he has obtained an office, mastership, or otherwise admission in a determinate civil sphere; of one, on the contrary, who is only 25 years old and the owner of a landed property [which] yields him 200 Fl. and more annually, one says, he is nothing<\/em>. If a constitution nevertheless makes him into something<\/em>, into an elector<\/em>, it grants him a high political right, without any connection with the other civil existences, and brings about for one of the most important affairs a condition which is connected more with the democratic, indeed even anarchic, principle of isolation<\/em> than with the principle of an organic order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The great beginnings of inner rightful relations in Germany, by which the formal formation of the state was prepared, are to be sought in history where, after the old royal governmental power had sunk in the Middle Ages and the whole had dissolved into atoms, now<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 483]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |483|<\/span> the knights, the free men, monasteries, the lords as well as those engaged in trade and crafts formed themselves, against this condition of disruption, into fellowships and corporations, which then wore away against one another until they found a tolerable existence side by side. Because the supreme power of the state, in whose impotence precisely the need of those corporations lay, was in this something so loose, these partial commonwealths developed their modes of association all the more firmly, more exactly, indeed even painfully, to a wholly constricting formalism and guild spirit, which through its aristocratism became obstructive and dangerous to the formation of the power of the state. After, in the most recent times, the formation of the higher powers of the state<\/em> has perfected itself, those subordinate<\/em> guild circles and communities have been dissolved, or at least deprived of their political place and relation to the inner right of the state. It would now, however, be time again, as one has hitherto organised chiefly in the spheres of the higher authorities of the state, to bring the lower spheres also back to a political order and honour, and, purified of privileges and wrongs, to fit them into the state as an organic formation. A living connection is only in an articulated whole whose parts themselves form particular, subordinate circles. To obtain such a whole, however, the French abstractions<\/em> of mere number<\/em> and quantum of property<\/em> must at last be abandoned, at least no longer made the principal determination and set up primarily as the sole conditions of one of the most important political functions. Such atomistic principles are, in politics as in science, the deadening of all rational concept, articulation and liveliness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It may also be recalled that the exercise of such a wholly isolated calling as that of being an elector easily loses its interest in a short time, and in general depends on contingent disposition and momentary pleasure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 484]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |484|<\/span> This calling is over with a single action, an action which occurs only once within several years; with the great number of those giving votes, the influence which his vote has may be regarded by the individual as very insignificant, the more so since the deputy whom he helps to elect is himself in turn only a member of a numerous assembly, in which only a small number can bring itself to the evidence of a considerable importance, while otherwise, through only one<\/em> vote among many, it furnishes an equally inconspicuous contribution. However much, then, it is expected psychologically that the interest of the citizens of the state should drive them to seek the capacity to vote most zealously, to hold it important and an honour, as well as to press forward to the exercise of this right and actually to exercise it with great circumspection and without any other interest, experience has shown on the contrary that the too great distance between the importance of the effect which is to come out and the influence of the individual, which presents itself as extremely trifling, soon has the consequence that those entitled to vote become indifferent to this their right; and when the first laws are occupied with excluding many citizens from voting, legal dispositions soon become necessary to induce those entitled to appear for voting. – The example of England, so often used superficially, of the lively agitation at the elections to parliament, does not fit here either; for in this part of the English constitution the privileges and inequalities of entitlement are precisely the most influential circumstance, – of which the contrary rather lies in that atomistic method.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Moreover it goes without saying that these remarks against the abstract principles of number, of quantum of property, of age, cannot aim at wishing to deprive these circumstances of their significance and their influence. On the contrary, if the entitlement to vote<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 485]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |485|<\/span> at the elections and eligibility itself are connected with the other institutions of the state, these circumstances exercise their influence of themselves; and if this is here legally ordained and, for example, for the capacity to be a member of a town magistracy, court, head and member of a corporation, guild and the like, a certain age, landed property and so on are required, this stands far more in proportion than when such dry, yet merely external conditions are set so abruptly over against the high interest of membership of the estates. – The guarantee<\/em> which is sought through such conditions for the capability of those electing and elected is in any case partly of a negative kind, partly a mere presumption; whereas there is a wholly different, positive guarantee, through having been chosen, by the trust of the government, to services of the state or, by the trust of the communities and of fellow citizens, to communal services and offices and having been received into fellowships, further through actual activity and share in the organic life of state and people having acquired the skill as well as the sense of it, the sense of governing and obeying, and having given occasion that the electors could get to know and test the dispositions and capacity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Provisions<\/em> of that kind, which presuppose the people not as a state but rather as a heap, and then divide this according to number into particular heaps and according to age and a single determination of property into two classes in general, cannot properly be called institutions of the state<\/em>. They do not suffice to take from the share of the people in the general affairs its democratic shapelessness and, more closely, to withdraw from contingency the purpose of obtaining capable deputies for an assembly of the land. An institution of the state cannot merely remain at the demand<\/em> that something should<\/em> happen, at the hope<\/em> that it will<\/em> happen, at the restriction of some circumstances which could make it difficult, – it<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 486]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |486|<\/span> deserves that name only if it is the arrangement that what should happen does happen<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since the reporter has become so prolix on this point, the remarks on the others must be kept shorter. – The estates have been granted the prerogative that without their consent no new taxes<\/em> shall be introduced and the existing ones not increased. W\u00fcrttemberg may well have been the first German land in which general estates of the realm came into possession of this right so early and in so open and definite a manner; the estates of the realm that we have seen emerge or revive elsewhere contain, in part, highly restrictive elements from the feudal constitution, and in part their formation and the determination of their sphere of operation still seem to stand in too provisional and murky a light for them to be compared with the free, frank and clear form in which the monarch of W\u00fcrttemberg wished to place his own. – The bloody struggle of the Tyroleans<\/em> against forms of state administration which they believed to be contrary to their old, inherited rights aroused general interest; upon the eventual reintroduction of their former constitution, the monarch reserved to himself the determination of the sum of the state levies and left to the estates only the apportionment. It may now be disputed whether the old W\u00fcrttemberg estates already possessed the right conceded to them by the King’s constitution, or not, and whether they did not earlier possess a far more extensive one, – a dispute which is without practical interest, and which for that very reason would be all the more suited to make a proper querelle d’Allemand<\/em>. One may well say that by the provision that the existing taxes be left in place<\/em> and that only an increase<\/em> should not take effect without their approval, the W\u00fcrttemberg estates were formally put back roughly on the standpoint on which the former W\u00fcrttemberg territorial estates found themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 487]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |487|<\/span> For the direct and indirect levies which formerly, as now, flowed into the princely chamber, and which rest on ground rents, annual dues, tithes, labour services and so on, are dominical rents and, in the sense of private law, the property of the ruler or of the state; they have the existing<\/em> as their basis and are thus exempt from any consent on the part of the estates of the realm. The other part of the taxes proper, direct and indirect, of the levies which were raised in the sense of public law, was fixed, both in amount and in its application to purposes of state, namely the discharge of the state debts and the payment of the circle troops and household troops, by contract, under the supreme judicial influence and confirmation of the authority of the Empire, so that here too the estates of the realm were bound to the existing as to a law. Even if, out of all the qualifications and particular circumstances under which the former estates of the realm exercised the granting of taxes at all, apart from the case of an increase, a general point of view and the assertion could be drawn, that they possessed this right of consent in a comprehensive sense<\/em>, such a right nonetheless receives an entirely new position and an incomparably greater extent and importance through the new circumstance that the land of W\u00fcrttemberg has become an independent state from a fief of the Empire. In that condition war and peace were made not by the individual estate of the Empire but by Emperor and Empire; the exertions which a war required were in part fixed once and for all by a matricular assessment. Not to speak of the fact that the formal obstinacy of the German estates, never to render more than could not, rightfully or wrongfully, be averted, had the consequence that the passive exertions became all the greater, – an expenditure which fell back just as unavoidably upon the territorial estates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 488]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Against refusals on the part of the estates of the realm the prince had, in general, a support and aid in the courts of the Empire. But after W\u00fcrttemberg had become an independent state<\/em>, the right of granting taxes by estates acquires a like independence and with it an entirely new sense, with regard to which no appeal can be made to the preceding condition. Here the state accordingly requires entirely new guarantees against private-mindedness and against the presumption of the estates, since the former guarantees which the government had in Emperor and Empire no longer exist; an entirely new element, the political<\/em>, has arisen, into which the estates are placed and which they previously lacked. – German particular history supplies examples enough that the drive of former estates of the realm in their political nullity went towards passive neutrality<\/em>, preferring to keep all intervention in worldly relations wholly away from themselves and to let whatever might come pass over them in disgrace, rather than to seize upon a self-resolution to action and to honour. Connected with such a drive to dishonour and inaction outwards is the tendency to turn activity, instead of against the external enemies<\/em>, rather against the government<\/em>. All too often the estates of the realm have seen in critical circumstances nothing other than an advantageous opportunity to put the government in embarrassment and, for the exertions which it demanded for its own honour and welfare and that of its people, to prescribe conditions and to acquire for themselves concessions of rights against it. All too often they succeeded in bringing thereby misfortune and disgrace upon a land for the present moment, but for the future a restriction and weakening of the power of government and with it a lasting foundation for internal and external disorder. From the political nullity to which the German people had been reduced by its constitution, from the incapacity of the many small wholes, of the greater part of the estates of the Empire, to have a resolution and will of their own,<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n [p. 489]<\/p>\n\n\n\n |489|<\/span> there had to proceed a spirit of sinking into private interest and of indifference, indeed of hostility, towards the thought of having a national honour and of making sacrifices for it. – If, for example, in the English nation the feeling of national honour has more generally pervaded the various classes of the people, then the right of Parliament to grant the levies annually has an entirely different sense from the same right in a people that would have been brought up in the private-minded outlook and, because it lay outside the political standpoint, been kept in the spirit of narrowness and private self-seeking. Already against such a spirit the governments would need, for the preservation of the state, a new guarantee, since they have in any case lost the scarcely sufficient one from Emperor and Empire. The right of participation in the determination of the state levies, however it may formerly have been constituted, is now, since the estates have no superior above them but their government of the state, to which they at the same time stand opposed, in and for itself an infinitely higher, more independent authority than before, just as they thereby receive a relation to and influence upon war and peace, upon external policy in general as well as upon the internal life of the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the circumstance that the
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