[p. 568]
|568| there comes to light the quite peculiar circumstance that those mayors and administrators of other communal property, poor funds, etc., do not themselves draw up the accounts of the administration of their treasuries or have to see to this business privately, but must have it produced from the writing factory of the district scribe. The costs are reckoned to the commune, and here the name district damage, under which they belong, is indeed quite fitting.
As regards first the side of these costs which accrue to the communes thereby, glaring examples of it are cited, e.g. that the drawing up of the account of a New Württemberg commune, the costs of which formerly amounted to 1 fl. 30 kr., has now, through the newly introduced Old Württemberg method of scribedom, risen to 50 fl.; a hamlet which formerly, for want of revenues, needed no account, nevertheless now found the art able to make one, which amounted to 56 fl. 20 kr. (Div. XVIII, p. 99 f.). These and a multitude of other examples would be amusing to read if they were not at the same time too unheard-of, too infamous swindles; just one more case: The communal account files of a place Mögglingen were given by the town scribe to a series of scribes one after another to be drawn up; to these together, none of whom wrote a word of the account, the commune had to pay for reading the files and studying them the sum of 900 fl., say nine hundred gulden; one passed it on this way, another that way; so much the account cost before a line of it was written, and the one who finally actually made it had, of course, rightly to be paid again for his trouble for the whole.
One of the most striking complaints among the grievances of the land compiled by the assembly of estates is made by the in part so considerable increase of the costs of administration of the property of the communes, of the poor funds, etc.; it ascribes all the evil to the abolition of the old
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