nterest. So keen was the particularistic spirit that not infrequently
the various provinces of the kingdom were referred to in contemporary
documents as "nations." Among these provinces some retained the system
of estates which had prevailed throughout Germany since the Middle
Ages, but in some of those which had fallen under the control of
Napoleon the estates had been abolished, and in others they were in
abeyance. In a few they had never existed. Votes were taken in the
assemblages of the estates by orders, not by individuals, and the
function of the bodies rarely extended beyond the approving of
projects of taxation. Within the provinces there existed no
sub-structure of popular institutions capable of being made the basis
of a national parliamentary system.

Notwithstanding these deterring circumstances, it is not improbable
that some sort of constitution might have been established but for the
excesses of the more zealous Liberals, culminating in the murder of
the dramatist Kotzebue in 1819, whereby the king was thrown into an
attitude, first of apprehension, and finally of uncompromising
reaction. By assuming joint responsibility for the Carlsbad Decrees of
October 17, 1819, he surrendered completely to the regime of
"stability" which all the while had been urged upon him by Metternich.
June 11, 1821, he summoned a commission to organize a system of
provincial estates;[362] but at the same time the project of a national
constitution and a national diet was definitely abandoned. Under (p. 249)
repression Prussian liberalism languished, and throughout the
remainder of the reign, i.e., to 1840, the issue of constitutionalism
was not frequently raised. In Prussia, as in Austria, the widespread
revolutionary demonstrations of 1830 elicited little response.

[Footnote 362: The system was created by royal
patent June 5, 1823.]

*265. The Diet of 1847.*--Upon the accession of Frederick William IV.,
son of Frederick William III., in 1840, the hopes of the Liberals were
revived. The new sovereign was believed to be a man of advanced ideas.
To a degree he was such, as was manifested by his speedy reversal of
his father's narrow ecclesiastical policy, and by other enlightened
acts. But time demonstrated that his liberalism was not without
certain very definite limits. February 13, 1847, he went so far as to
summon a Vereinigter Landtag, or "united diet," of Prussia, comprising
all m