[p. 564]
|564| are further elaborated on p. 31: “The old German right and the old German usages”, it says, “naturally cannot be set in any comparison with Roman right; the silliness of crude and uncultivated minds of a dark age must form a singular contrast beside the wisdom of the greatest and most sublime jurists of ancient Rome and of the whole world, indeed become quite and utterly ridiculous and contemptible”, etc. Is this the spirit of German popular character that we see honoured and alive in such a tone? With scorn it is further adduced that the diet of the year 1515, as well as several following ones, made bitter complaints about the learned, who noticeably in all courts, throughout the land, break in with their proceedings, so that now one who needs to go to law does not get off with ten gulden, who perhaps twelve years ago would have settled the matter altogether with ten shillings, and that if no heed were taken here, one would in time have to put one or two doctors in every village to pronounce judgement. Vain complaints, for “death had once been sworn to the old German usages”. One or two doctors, it is true, did not come into every Württemberg village, but the scribes did instead; and it would be useless to inquire whether the citizens have gained by these likewise not old German usages.
These scribes, then, who are properly the concern here, Herr Consultant Griesinger defines as juristic and cameralistic practitioners, and he places the peculiarity of the Württemberg scribes in their being such merely unstudied practitioners. That this, however, is the same case in other countries, namely to a certain extent, is a well-known and natural matter, since for a large part of the functions of scribedom a university education is at least something superfluous. The peculiarity of the Württemberg institution of scribedom, however, shows itself, according to this opinion and the petitions, to lie in something quite different.
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