Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 569]

|569| constitution. From the statements which result concerning the institution of scribedom it is evident that these complaints were raised especially in the newly added parts of the country, and the detailed communal accounts that have been printed also show that it is precisely the introduction of this Old Württemberg nuisance which brought about an enormous increase of the costs of administration. Much more could still be cited, of the unpermitted chargings, the prolixity of the accounts (among other things, for example, in the accounts of communal poor funds and other such, which are to be drawn up in duplo or triplo, even the bills of the tradesmen are inserted again in extenso, and indeed also in duplo and triplo) and the like. – With this practice of sucking the citizens dry, in a rightful as well as a wrongful way, there is then connected the glaring picture which is made of the customs of this estate, of its ignorance, coarseness, clumsiness, arrogance, etc.; Div. XVIII, p. 9 ff. It says on p. 40 of the same, “that this estate was at no time held in esteem in Württemberg; in the high regard which was shown from time to time, with so much right, to individuals of it, there lay tacitly the contempt for the estate as a whole, because distinguished scribes were always a great rarity”. The glaring colours, moreover, which one reads at once in the first chapter of this opinion, are not so much ground by the author as only a compilation from the writings which have appeared about that estate from other writers, older and more recent, and which give a unanimous testimony; – there are even among them some authors who themselves belonged to this estate and must have known it best. One cannot well say anything harder of a class of men than these depictions contain.

More far-reaching, however, than all this is the circumstance that to the principal, the town and district scribe, the same sum must be paid which his scribes sent out earn or extort, according to their charges, for their

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