Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 566]

|566| for preparatory training, – for what? for the filling of more extensive chief district offices! As if the difference did not merely concern the quantity of business; in quality they are the same. The citizens belonging to the smaller official districts would, according to that notion, be the animae viles on which the inexperienced appointee should train himself into an official only because they belong to a geographically smaller district. – Because now also that juristic practice which elsewhere is performed by studied jurists for their preparatory training for an office, under the supervision and guidance of an actual official, falls wholly to the scribes, the importance of the latter becomes evident, both in relation to an inexperienced superior and in itself, in that the studied superior of an office of 20,000 souls and more, who also united in himself police power and branches of administrative power together with judicial, has only scribes as assistants.

The principal part in the picture of the institution or nuisance (for the scribe nuisance appears in the addresses and petitions as it were as a technical and recognised expression for the institution of scribedom) is, however, that monopoly which is allotted to the town and district scribes. Further, in order to exercise it, they keep as required 10, 20 writing hands, whom they partly keep with them at the centre, partly send out into the market towns and villages to write. A detail of the business which they have to write must be looked up in the opinion itself. Apart from the business of the apportionment of taxes, of writing tax slips, tax-receipt books, of the determination of the taxable property of each individual citizen, of noting the changes through sale of houses, estates, marriages, etc., then likewise of the apportionment of the communal expenditure of the so-called town and district damage⁷⁾ there are

7) Hegel’s footnote. According to this terminology, for example, the erection of a new bridge, of a town hall, etc., would also be called a damage.

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