Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 474]

|474| of extent, of social condition and of wealth. In such smaller countries the greater part of those who acquire a scientific, in general a more universal cultivation will see themselves induced to seek their economic and social existence in the service of the state; there will therefore, when the servants of the state have been subtracted, be found out of proportion fewer who bring into an assembly of estates a considerable insight and experience in general affairs, – in any case still fewer who could be called statesmen. The nobility has already been in part taken away among the holders of individual votes, another part of it will be found in royal service; in general, for the places of the deputies to be elected, the nobility was not reckoned with; on the contrary. The estate of advocates, which among the remaining estates can come into consideration chiefly, is, in its concepts and business in the first instance, bound to the principles of private right, and moreover of positive right, which are opposed to the principles of the right of the state, that is of the rational, of which there can be talk only in the case of a rational constitution, – so that the sense of a statesman all too famous hit the mark rightly in this when he declared advocates the most unskilful at counselling and acting in public affairs. How the spirit of advocates has worked in the history of the Württemberg assembly of estates will show itself in what follows. – The legal exclusion of this estate could well be contradicted from the side of abstract right, yet not more than the exclusion of physicians and surgeons; an organisation of the state, however, rests upon a wholly different concrete wisdom than a formalism abstracted from private right. A quite peculiar structure of the old-Württemberg condition, which is of the first importance for the constitution of the estates there, the estate of scribes, we shall come to know in the sequel. The contribution which the estate

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