We don't want anything unlimited, we want a well-placed, harmonious legal whole, in which every element is assigned to and firmly and legally secured to the sphere befitting it according to a higher, eternal order. I view this constitution, for which I truly have no special liking, as the initial primer in a harmonious painting, and it certainly befits us to adjust the contours and to apply a proper coloring, but not to blot it out, since we have no assurance that the new primer will produce something different and better at the first attempt. (Hear, hear! and bravo on the right.)
Likewise, we want a state parliament, but in a wholly different spirit than existed in the German lands from 1815 to 1848; we do not want it to include a weakening of monarchical authority, not a mutual control of mistrust, as the gentleman proposing the motion puts it; instead we want it to include a strengthening of the Crown. Through it, we want to add the moral power of public impression to the legal power of the Crown. (Bravo on the right.)
You will recall, gentlemen, our negotiations about the disciplinary measures against the dissidents, about the establishment of district and provincial estates, about Austrian troops marching into Holstein. Would the Crown have had more power on these occasions without the Chambers? Did it not in fact have a great deal more power because of the Chambers? (Lively shout: Very true, quite right!)
It would also have been possible to carry out all of this under absolute monarchy; but it would have remained a mistaken judgment, a reproach, an indictment – moral victory was then achieved by the Crown through discussions in the Chambers! – And if one abolished the Chambers, would this abolish the power of public judgment? Will it not rather be the case that this power then remains solely with the daily press and public-house conversations? But are not the Chambers a far more reliable and a far more dignified organ than these?
We do not want the state parliament, furthermore, in order to promote so-called progress, this great process of disintegration of our era; on the contrary, [we want it] in order to maintain conditions, and to restore them where they have been damaged. We do not want to cede the field to the bureaucracy alone. (Bravo.)
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