Although without salary, the office had become attractive, not only on account of the importance and immunities which it conferred, but also because a large part of the attendant labor brought in satisfactory fees. In the eagerness to prove limpieza, investigations into genealogies were perpetual; nearly all these passed through the Inquisition and were confided to the commissioner nearest to the birth-place of the applicant. He was expected to pay roundly and the commissioner was entitled to sixteen reales a day for his time, or to two ducats if he had to leave his residence. Moreover the knowledge thus acquired of the genealogies of his neighbors gave him power to render them uncomfortable, as we may gather from a carta acordada of 1622, forbidding commissioners to make notes of the ancestry of those who were not officials of the Inquisition and threatening dismissal for stigmatizing any one as a Jew, Moor, Converso or descendant of such.[794] At sea-ports and frontier towns, also, the commissioners had a considerable source of revenue from fees for the examinations requisite to prevent the entrance of heretics and heretic books--fees which, as we shall see hereafter, were the abundant source of complaint. These positions the inquisitor-general reserved for his own appointment and finally also those in the cathedral towns and larger cities.[795] In the effort at reform made by Philip V, investigation was made into the character of the commissioners, their notaries and the familiars and, soon after this, in 1706, the Suprema asserted that, in Castile, there was not one fourth of the number permitted by the Concordia of 1553, which it attributed partly to the War of Succession then raging and partly to the molestation to which they were exposed.[796] Unquestionably the number declined rapidly during the eighteenth century, as will be seen by the table in the Appendix where, although Saragossa still has thirty-eight and Barcelona twenty-eight, the other tribunals report only from two to seven, except the Canaries, where the scattered group of islands necessarily demanded a considerable number. This diminution may be explained by the growing habit of appointing temporary commissioners in any place where work was to be done. Moreover the increasing facilities of communication favored local centralization in the tribunal, even as general centralization was stimulated in the Suprema. Denunciations were readily sent by mail and temporary commissions were issued for their investigation. So, too, in the matter of limpieza, the tribunal could dispense its patronage more profitably by sending out from head-quarters special commissioners who earned a larger per diem at the expense of the applicant. To accommodate this new development, when in 1816 a new _cartilla_ of instructions for commissioners was printed, it was provided at the end with a number of blank commissions which could be detached and filled in for use. A