Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 571]

|571| conditions. – If the Württemberg citizens are really afflicted with this scribe-bondage or scribe-serfdom – as it seems to be de facto the case and as the estates of the realm cannot well deny -, it would at least be more expedient as well as more just to turn the advantage of this subjection to the state and in its name to lease out this monopoly⁸⁾, instead of those dues, without being payment for a labour, merely falling into the purse of private persons, of whom some are thereby, as it says Section XVIII, p. 111, as well off as an Austrian and French bishop.

8) Hegel’s footnote. On p. 64 Section XVIII it is cited that “Duke Karl in the year 1760 used the excessive scribe earnings of the town and district scribes as a pretext to compel them to a forced loan of 50,000 fl. to the war chest”. – That pretext could at least be regarded as just as good a ground, and this despotic act easily as just as just, as those feudal dues and revenues of the town and district scribes themselves.

It has been mentioned that the mayors, as also other heads of communes, administrators of poor funds and the like, do not themselves draw up the accounts of their administration, but that this business belongs to the privileged scribe. It is already important that those communal officials and administrators of foundations are kept in legitimate incapacity by such an arrangement. But of more significant weight than this circumstance, and even than the expenditure of costs considered just now, which accrues from this to the communes and the other funds, is the dependence in which all the heads of communes of a district are thereby placed upon the town and district scribe. On this side, which reaches further into the organism of the state, there is found, Section XVIII, p. 97, a depiction in a petition from Gmünd, which presents the monster of scribedom in its various branches with official evidence⁹⁾;

9) Hegel’s footnote. One is astonished at the detail there given at length of the sucking dry of the communes by the system of scribedom; among it are found the calculations of localities in which the costs of scribedom amount to 6 ³/₄ and 7 taxes.

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