[INTRODUCTION]

The task that was begun two and a half years ago – of introducing a representative constitution and thereby bringing to completion a German monarchy that has arisen in our time – awakened from its beginning such a universal interest in the German public that nothing could be more agreeable to it than the publication of the Proceedings of the Württemberg Estates Assembly. In place of the hopes which accompanied the beginning and the progress of this effort, there must appear at the end a result and the judgment of it. The thirty-three volumes with which this review is concerned of course do not yet contain the completion of the main goal, but they do form an historical whole. For, on the one hand, they present the progress up to the death of the king who founded the monarchy and who began the second step – the inner, free structuring of that monarchy – and the characteristic development of this event in its principal features falls within his reign. On the other hand, the work of the Estates appears to have been brought to completion, since a representative committee is finished with its draft of a constitution, which likewise has appeared in print.

Of course, these Proceedings present only one side of the efforts of that endeavor: the public efforts, insofar as they enter into the Estates Assembly.