Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/502

476 privilege of pasturing fifty sheep of his own, and receives seven dollars and a half a year from the commune and about fifty dollars yearly in grain from the citizens. The cow-herder makes about forty dollars a year, and the goose-herder receives a hundred loaves of bread from the citizens and twenty-two dollars in money from the commune, for which he must do all the town-crying and go daily for the orders of the Bauermeister.

I could get very little information in regard to the modes of taxation of the village, each person being willing to tell me what taxes he paid but no one seeming to know just how they were assessed. A farmer with forty acres of land paid, the year I was in E——, five dollars as land-tax, three dollars as poll-tax, one dollar as house-tax, and four dollars as village-tax. He would also, if he had kept a shop or inn, have had to pay a special license. Incomes of less than one hundred and ten dollars are exempt from taxation. Ministers and teachers pay state but not village taxes. The pastor of E—— paid a tax of nine dollars on his income of four hundred and fifty dollars, and a land-tax of twenty-four dollars on two hundred acres of land. Communal taxes vary greatly in rate according to the wealth of the commune. Some communes, which own valuable mines or forests, not only exact no tax from their citizens, but divide annually a surplus among the corporators. A case of this sort is rare, but it is not uncommon to have most of the communal taxes paid by the sale of wood from commune forests.

Almshouse accommodations are so poor and the food and treatment so bad that but few of the inhabitants of E—— feel pauperism to be their vocation. Only one villager receives food and shelter from the village, and a second food alone. Their provisions are obtained by going from house to house in the village, each house being bound by law to provide food for the paupers so many days each year. I asked why the poor-house was not repaired, and was told that the peasants had purposely built it poorly, fearing that if it were comfortable it might encourage pauperism in the village. The poor are supplied with clothes either from the church or village treasury according to circumstances. A residence of two years in a village compels its inhabitants at the expiration of that time to support the applicant, nor can he be forced to do any work in return for his living. The one pauper in E—— was so distressing to the eye that I never passed him if I could avoid it. Blind and lame, hatless, coatless, shoeless, and covered with the mud in which he had slept, he seemed, as he crept from fence-post to fence-post, muttering curses on those who passed without giving him alms, to be forsaken alike by God and man. I can imagine him being, in the words of a dying tramp, "glad to have a hell to go to," but I can not believe that any moderately respectable imp would touch him without the aid of a pair of tongs. A gift of one cent would cause him to bless you until he had reached the nearest