[p. 572]
|572| on the [branch] of which there is talk here, it says: “In communal accounts the scribe makes himself master of all the papers of the journal, the vouchers and receipts of the so-called accountant, without giving a special deposit receipt for them. From this moment the mayor is his slave; he has slept his last quiet sleep, for the thought of knowing his credit, honour and good name delivered over to a strange unknown man torments him incessantly. Many a scribe now has payments on account made to him at once and wanders off with them into another region of the Empire. If at last the business is begun by one of the successors, the accountant’s period of suffering takes its beginning; he has made inadmissible expenditures, receipts are missing, a considerable deficit appears; the accountant’s prospect is the fortress or the penitentiary. Now when the man conscious of his innocence is at this point of despair, then, after the appropriate means have been taken, there is a change of course again, the receipts are found again or made, etc. The accountant, together with the figures or attesting persons who appear in it, signs his account, wholly unintelligible to him throughout, and comprehends as little as he did in the case of the deficit formerly charged against him that there is now due to him in the end a credit balance.”
In such hands, then, are the heads of communes, in such hands is the people! “My people, your leaders deceive you!” – when they speak of the good old right, one would like to exclaim with the prophet. But as far as one will be from accepting that depiction, so far as the personal is concerned, as general, just as certainly there issues not from the personalities but from such arrangements the necessary dependence of the heads of communes,
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