The most ancient forms of finance have always been taxes on produce. Such appear to have been the taxes of ancient Egypt; such were and still are the principal taxes of Turkey and Hindustan. Whatever may have been the character of the first agricultural settlement, the development of a central government has always been assisted by a theory that the true lordship of the soil is the property of the state or the ruler, on which the immediate occupant of the soil is dependent, and to which a portion of the produce is due. The conquests of Rome always involved a confiscation of the vanquished nation’s land, and the re-grant of a portion of the confiscated estate on what we might call by analogy a base tenure. In the same way, when in the 10th and 11th centuries the Christianized Teutonic tribes of northeastern Europe pressed on the heathen Slavs, the victory of the former was always followed by the establishment of a military and well-endowed church, on which a third of the conquered territory was generally settled, the vanquished race being permitted, though in a state of dependence, to occupy the residue. The settlement of Aegina and Euboea by the Athenian lot-holders, to say nothing of more ancient occupancies, was of the same character. Here indeed the state distributed the ownership which it had acquired by its arms among its citizens, though doubtless it claimed military service from them as a garrison, and probably exacted a revenue which was similar in its nature to a rent.

The financial system of ancient states was, as a rule, exceedingly simple. The charges of government were few, except in the vast despotisms of Asia and Egypt, and later on in the great military republics of Carthage and Rome, where the revenues of the king and state were derived from tribute in money or kind from inferior or dependent districts and races. The district of the Aristotelian ideal city (Politics, vii. 10, 11) is to be divided into two portions, one the property of the state, out of the produce of which the charges of the national religion and the costs of the common tables are to be supplied, the other to be held in private ownership. The philosopher does not contemplate the necessity of making provision for the ordinary charges of government. The magistrates were unpaid; the army was a militia, serving at its own charges. When the Lacedaemonians undertook the command of the allies in the Peloponnesian war, they had no public revenue. Later on in their history, we are told by Aristotle that the public exchequer of the Lacedaemonians was ill managed, for most of the land of Laconia belonged to the Spartiate, and they assessed themselves.

The beginning of Athenian finance was a revenue derived from the silver mines in the promontory of Sunium, the ownership of which was, it seems, vested in the state. It was the practice of the Athenian Government to grant a perpetual lease of allotments in these mines, and to exact, moreover, a small percentage on the produce, reserving to itself a right of forfeiture and re-entry if the terms of the lease were infringed, or the produce rents were unpaid. With the proceeds of these mines the Athenians built their first navy, and with this navy they won the victory of Salamis, thus paving the way to their naval supremacy.

The next great source of Athenian revenue was the contribution from those protected states which failed to supply a proper naval contingent for the defence of the Aegean. Most of the Greek cities of Asia Minor and the islands owed their security from the attacks of the Phoenician navy, then dependent on Persia, to the vigorous and effective sea forces of the Athenian republic. It was cheaper for them to commute their contingent for a money payment, and the police of the sea became far more efficient when wielded by a single power, which had every interest in bringiug its navy to the highest pitch of serviceableness. The Athenians contrived to economize, and, later on, to increase the contributions of those states whom they protected. Considering that they had fully satisfied the terms of their own bargain if they thrust back the Persian despot, they concluded that they might fairly accumulate a surplus in the public treasury, and even expend a portion of their revenues in embellishing their city. we may be certain that the power which this revenue gave the Athenian republic was the chief cause of that jealous fear which precipitated the thirty years’ war of the 5th century b.c., and which produced results as disastrous to the progress of mankind as a war of the same duration twenty centuries later did on the rapidly growing civilization of central Europe. So desperate and so penniless were the military rivals of Athens, overwhelming as their land forces were, that they even thought of appropriating the sacred treasures of Delphi, a proposal, in the 5th century before Christ, which was as shocking as it would have been in the 12th century after Christ to have suggested that the sacred vessels and shrines of the great churches and monasteries should be coined in order to pay the soldiers of the crusade.

The finance of antiquity derived a revenue from customs. These customs were, at least in Athens, an ad valorem duty of two per cent, as a war measure. Twelve years before the conclusion of the great thirty years’ struggle, the Athenians levied a five per cent, ad valorem duty on their subject cities, though this was in substitution for the old contribution on account of the police of the seas. A poll tax was levied on foreign residents, perhaps on slaves; and it appears that, possibly as a measure of police, another poll tax was imposed on the inmates of disreputable houses.

The revenue, therefore, of that Greek state whose history is best known to us was derived from the rent of public lands, especially the mines, from a composition paid by the allies in lieu of naval service, from very moderate customs duties, and from a few personal taxes. It must not, however, be imagined that the finance of antiquity was successful in the eyes of those who saw how inelastic it was. There is still extant a treatise by a very practical man. Xenophon, in the oldest work on finance, discusses the means by which the Athenian home revenue might be conveniently increased, and, like many other speculative thinkers, suggests projects which would have created far more mischief than they would have remedied. It will be obvious also that by far the most important item in Athenian finance, the contributions from the allies in lieu of personal service, was necessarily precarious, and that when the Athenian empire was finally broken up, the revenue of the state was gone, while the necessity of finding ways and means for the public defence was as urgent as ever.

This brings us to another aspect of Athenian finance, viz., the extraordinary taxes on property which the Government levied, and which the contributors paid apparently with the greatest readiness. These were the Λεtτoυργιαι, exceptional imposts with a view to defraying certain kinds of public expenditure; and property taxes assessed on a valuation, and graduated according to the means of the contributor.

The principal liturgies, as they are called from the Greek word quoted above (the word is suggestive of the process by which it was finally appropriated in the ecclesiastical vocabulary), were three in number, two religious and one secular. The tendency of a religion, like that of Greece, in which so much nature worship was contained, was to associate many of the acts of life with religious ceremonies, and, as culture progressed, with art. Thus the drama of antiquity arose from the worship of the wine god and the vintage, and the arts of sculpture and painting had originally a similar religious origin. The dramatist who succeeded in securing a representation of bis composition had assigned to him a citizen whose wealth was sufficient to defray some of the charges of representation, as the instruction, maintenance, and dresses of the actors. A second and similarly religious service was the public games. Here again a considerable portion of the expenses incurred in the performance werθ imposed on wealthy persons. The third was the trierarchy, the equipment and command of a ship of war. The state supplied the ship, the trierarch its stores and tackling, and in some cases provisions and pay. In return the trierarch was captain of the ship. This arrangement is closely analogous to that financial arrangement in England by which, after the Revolution, local regiments were raised, clothed, and officered by wealthy men, who had in return the colonelcy of the regiment, and the right of appointing its subordinate officers.

The liability to these charges, distributed, as it seems, at the discretion of the Government, was a serious charge on the wealthy. Hence, when the state fell on evil days, and reverses had impoverished the Athenian people, persons were allowed to club together in order to supply these public functions. To abandon them would have been to incur the wrath of the gods, or imperil the safety of the state. The modern critics of Greek sentiment are amazed at the fact that only on the very eve of the great crisis in which the fate of Greece was finally determined, the battle of Chaeronea, Athens reluctantly devoted the taxes which had hitherto been employed for ecclesiastical purposes to the pressing necessities of the public defence. The theorie fund was that portion of the revenues of the state which was assigned to those sacred purposes. It was distributed nominally among the spectators as the price of tickets for admission. It actually was paid over to the managers of those public buildings in which the ceremony was performed.

If the person on whom the duty of supplementing the charges of the state was imposed conceived that he was unfairly selected, or asserted that his means were inadequate for the purpose, he was allowed to name another citizen to whom he could proffer an exchange of property. In this offer the other was bound to acquiesce, unless he consented to allow himself to be substituted for the individual on whom the duty was originally set. In short, the possession of property involved serious liabilities in Athens, though it seems that men of substance gloried in the satisfaction of these public charges, and completely conformed themselves to public opinion. For it will be found to be a fundamental law in successful finance that those imposts are always found to be most productive which are most in accord with public opinion, and that in the selection of a system of taxation it is not always possible to adopt that which is most expedient or even most just, but that which can be most readily enforced and is most willingly accorded.

But the most remarkable illustration of Athenian opinion in matters of finance is the regular property tax. In the costly services which have been sketched above, some compensation was afforded to the contributor by the position he occupied. The choragus was the chief official in rank at those religious ceremonies in which the drama was the highest act of worship; the chief of the gymnasts exercised authority over his staff of competitors in the public games, and was even empowered to compel parents to allow their children to take part in the contest. The man of substance on whom the state imposed the duty of equipping, manning, and provisioning a hull was captain of the vessel, and though he was liable to a due performance of his service, and subject to an audit on the termination of his year of office, he exercised full authority during his command, and might be, indeed was, rewarded for exceptional diligence and smartness during the period of his office.

The property tax was a contribution which did not make the tax payer conspicuous, and did not confer on him any distinction. The impost dates from the earliest records of the Athenian constitution. It was graduated, being a heavier percentage in the case of the richer citizens than in that of the middle classes. It passed through several notable changes, always, however, in the same direction, the particulars of which are well given in Boeckh’s Public Economy of Athens. But the principles of the assessment are very simple, though the process by which the result was finally arrived at is somewhat artificial.

The property of every Athenian citizen was assessed, whether it were movable or immovable, and the amount was entered in a public register. The assessment included the value of slaves, manufactured goods, and raw materials. A register of the assessment was open for examination, and undoubtedly re-valuations were frequent. The state was informed as to the property which each citizen— and indeed every resident alien—possessed, and made this property the basis of direct taxation. It then proceeded to divide all assessments into several schedules, assuming in each schedule a variable quantity, varying from a fifth to a tenth, as the taxable property of the individual. On this sum it levied a fixed rate. Thus, if a very wealthy man possessed an estate valued at 500 talents, i.e., nearly £122,000, his taxable wealth was treated as £24,400, and a five per cent, tax, £1220, exacted from him; while the owner of property valued at 25 mime, t.e., about £101, 10s., the lowest sum apparently which was liable to property tax, found his property assessed for purposes of taxation at £10, 3s., and his property tax of five per cent, at a little over 10s.

In the budget speech which the great statesman of the Athenian empire delivered before the commencement of the Peloponnesian war, and of which Thucydides gives us the heads, we learn that the revenue of Athens from the contributions cf her allies amounted on an average to 600 talents (£147,250) a year, and that there was an existing accumulation of treasure in coined silver amounting to a million and a half sterling, besides other immediate resources. It is to be regretted that the historian did not supply us with further particulars as to the finance of his country during the period of her greatest wealth and power. These resources, had Athens merely carried on a defensive warfare, would, as the statesman justly argued, have rendered the country not only unconquerable, but practically invulnerable.

The high rate of interest, and the general insecurity of society, excluded the states of ancient Greece from having recourse to regular loans, though not from attempting to meet current exigencies by anticipations of revenue. Occasionally portions of the revenue were assigned to creditors; sometimes the public lands were granted for a term, during which the principal and interest might be repaid. Instances may even be found in which the state issued a currency of tokens, which fulfilled some of the functions of state paper in modern times. Another financial expedient, always followed by the most mischievous consequences, was occasionally adopted, the issue, namely, of a debased currency. But from this fraud Athens always kept herself free, not only inflicting the punishment of death on those who put base money into circulation (the criminal code of Athens having been generally very lenient), but abstaining in her deepest distress from the temptation of supplementing her revenues by the temporary issue of base money So studious was Athens of her reputation in this respect that, when she was the home of the fine arts, she continued to maintain the clumsy archaic type of her coinage, although the arts of die-sinking and coining were carried to perfection in states which were far less scrupulous.

The revenue of Rome in the earlier ages of the republic was derived from the lands of the state, payments in kind or money from subjects, from import and export duties, and a few taxes on products and articles of luxury. Partly as compensation for the loss of the national domain, partly as a means of checking discontent, the state, in the later ages of the republic and the beginning of the empire, undertook the maintenance of its poorer citizens, either by gratuitous distributions of corn, or by the sale of food at low fixed prices. Cicero calculates the charge incurred by the revenue in consequence of this expedient at one-fifth of the public expenditure. Augustus increased the charges of maintaining these state paupers till the cost amounted to more than half of what had been the revenue of republican Rome. The emperor Vespasian declared (Suet., Vesp. 16) that the necessities of government in Rome required a sum of £400,000,000 sterling, apparently after the destructive civil war which preceded the elevation of the Flavian family to the throne. But the manner in which the revenue of the Roman empire was collected was even more destructive than the crushing weight of the charge itself.

The collection of taxes in Rome, both under the republic and the early empire, was entrusted to contractors, who purchased by auction the right of levying the tax. The character of the Roman contractor is aptly illustrated by Livy, who narrates the frauds practised by those persons on the Roman treasury during the deepest distresses of the second Punic war, and the violence with which other contractors defended the interests of the order in general, and the convicts in particular. But after the Macedonian war, the Roman citizen was relieved from direct taxes, the weight of which fell on the provincials. Associations of wealthy men were formed, who could give security to the Government, and who, being protected by the Government, could practice what extortion they pleased on the provincials. The law, indeed, provided that such persons should be liable to prosecution for corrupt and illegal practices, but the law was far too weak to check the malpractices of the officials. It appears that the province was divided into districts, or dioceses, as they are called, a manager being appointed for each district, who was in regular correspondence with the chief of the office at Rome. The law recognized the guild of the publicans, who were indeed, by their agency, the centre of the Roman system of finance, and in many emergencies the parties with whom the state negotiated for an advance on the security of its revenues. But, on the other hand, it was said with too much truth that where the tax-gatherer appeared public law and private liberty vanished.

Taxes paid in kind were the tenth of corn and the fifth of fruit. Such taxes were imposed in Sicily, in Africa, in Sardinia, and in Egypt. Spain was treated more generously, partly to compensate for the reputed unproductiveness of its soil, partly in all likelihood from fear of the high-spirited character of its inhabitants. In some cases, the contributor of the tithe had to carry his quota to the nearest port for shipment to Rome. The rest of the empire paid money taxes, partly from an assessment on the value of property, partly by what appears to be a poll tax, but was really an artificial estimate, under which several needy persons might be made to represent a unit, and on the other hand one wealthy person might be treated as many units. The assessment lasted for a definite period, which, in the age of Constantine at least, got the name of the Indiction. In the sense of a tax, this term is as old as Pliny, if indeed it cannot be carried back to the early empire.

The finance of the Roman empire imposed a tax on the profits of trade, which seems to have been collected with great severity, and to have exposed those who were...

The most ancient forms of finance have always been taxes on produce. Such appear to have been the taxes of ancient Egypt; such were and still are the principal taxes of Turkey and Hindustan. Whatever may have been the character of the first agricultural settlement, the development of a central government has always been assisted by a theory that the true lordship of the soil is the property of the state or the ruler, on which the immediate occupant of the soil is dependent, and to which a portion of the produce is due. The conquests of Rome always involved a confiscation of the vanquished nation’s land, and the re-grant of a portion of the confiscated estate on what we might call by analogy a base tenure. In the same way, when in the 10th and 11th centuries the Christianized Teutonic tribes of northeastern Europe pressed on the heathen Slavs, the victory of the former was always followed by the establishment of a military and well-endowed church, on which a third of the conquered territory was generally settled, the vanquished race being permitted, though in a state of dependence, to occupy the residue. The settlement of Aegina and Euboea by the Athenian lot-holders, to say nothing of more ancient occupancies, was of the same character. Here indeed the state distributed the ownership which it had acquired by its arms among its citizens, though doubtless it claimed military service from them as a garrison, and probably exacted a revenue which was similar in its nature to a rent.

The financial system of ancient states was, as a rule, exceedingly simple. The charges of government were few, except in the vast despotisms of Asia and Egypt, and later on in the great military republics of Carthage and Rome, where the revenues of the king and state were derived from tribute in money or kind from inferior or dependent districts and races. The district of the Aristotelian ideal city (Politics, vii. 10, 11) is to be divided into two portions, one the property of the state, out of the produce of which the charges of the national religion and the costs of the common tables are to be supplied, the other to be held in private ownership. The philosopher does not contemplate the necessity of making provision for the ordinary charges of government. The magistrates were unpaid; the army was a militia, serving at its own charges. When the Lacedaemonians undertook the command of the allies in the Peloponnesian war, they had no public revenue. Later on in their history, we are told by Aristotle that the public exchequer of the Lacedaemonians was ill managed, for most of the land of Laconia belonged to the Spartiate, and they assessed themselves.

The beginning of Athenian finance was a revenue derived from the silver mines in the promontory of Sunium, the ownership of which was, it seems, vested in the state. It was the practice of the Athenian Government to grant a perpetual lease of allotments in these mines, and to exact, moreover, a small percentage on the produce, reserving to itself a right of forfeiture and re-entry if the terms of the lease were infringed, or the produce rents were unpaid. With the proceeds of these mines the Athenians built their first navy, and with this navy they won the victory of Salamis, thus paving the way to their naval supremacy.

The next great source of Athenian revenue was the contribution from those protected states which failed to supply a proper naval contingent for the defence of the Aegean. Most of the Greek cities of Asia Minor and the islands owed their security from the attacks of the Phoenician navy, then dependent on Persia, to the vigorous and effective sea forces of the Athenian republic. It was cheaper for them to commute their contingent for a money payment, and the police of the sea became far more efficient when wielded by a single power, which had every interest in bringiug its navy to the highest pitch of serviceableness. The Athenians contrived to economize, and, later on, to increase the contributions of those states whom they protected. Considering that they had fully satisfied the terms of their own bargain if they thrust back the Persian despot, they concluded that they might fairly accumulate a surplus in the public treasury, and even expend a portion of their revenues in embellishing their city. we may be certain that the power which this revenue gave the Athenian republic was the chief cause of that jealous fear which precipitated the thirty years’ war of the 5th century b.c., and which produced results as disastrous to the progress of mankind as a war of the same duration twenty centuries later did on the rapidly growing civilization of central Europe. So desperate and so penniless were the military rivals of Athens, overwhelming as their land forces were, that they even thought of appropriating the sacred treasures of Delphi, a proposal, in the 5th century before Christ, which was as shocking as it would have been in the 12th century after Christ to have suggested that the sacred vessels and shrines of the great churches and monasteries should be coined in order to pay the soldiers of the crusade.

The finance of antiquity derived a revenue from customs. These customs were, at least in Athens, an ad valorem duty of two per cent, as a war measure. Twelve years before the conclusion of the great thirty years’ struggle, the Athenians levied a five per cent, ad valorem duty on their subject cities, though this was in substitution for the old contribution on account of the police of the seas. A poll tax was levied on foreign residents, perhaps on slaves; and it appears that, possibly as a measure of police, another poll tax was imposed on the inmates of disreputable houses.

The revenue, therefore, of that Greek state whose history is best known to us was derived from the rent of public lands, especially the mines, from a composition paid by the allies in lieu of naval service, from very moderate customs duties, and from a few personal taxes. It must not, however, be imagined that the finance of antiquity was successful in the eyes of those who saw how inelastic it was. There is still extant a treatise by a very practical man. Xenophon, in the oldest work on finance, discusses the means by which the Athenian home revenue might be conveniently increased, and, like many other speculative thinkers, suggests projects which would have created far more mischief than they would have remedied. It will be obvious also that by far the most important item in Athenian finance, the contributions from the allies in lieu of personal service, was necessarily precarious, and that when the Athenian empire was finally broken up, the revenue of the state was gone, while the necessity of finding ways and means for the public defence was as urgent as ever.

This brings us to another aspect of Athenian finance, viz., the extraordinary taxes on property which the Government levied, and which the contributors paid apparently with the greatest readiness. These were the Λεtτoυργιαι, exceptional imposts with a view to defraying certain kinds of public expenditure; and property taxes assessed on a valuation, and graduated according to the means of the contributor.

The principal liturgies, as they are called from the Greek word quoted above (the word is suggestive of the process by which it was finally appropriated in the ecclesiastical vocabulary), were three in number, two religious and one secular. The tendency of a religion, like that of Greece, in which so much nature worship was contained, was to associate many of the acts of life with religious ceremonies, and, as culture progressed, with art. Thus the drama of antiquity arose from the worship of the wine god and the vintage, and the arts of sculpture and painting had originally a similar religious origin. The dramatist who succeeded in securing a representation of bis composition had assigned to him a citizen whose wealth was sufficient to defray some of the charges of representation, as the instruction, maintenance, and dresses of the actors. A second and similarly religious service was the public games. Here again a considerable portion of the expenses incurred in the performance werθ imposed on wealthy persons. The third was the trierarchy, the equipment and command of a ship of war. The state supplied the ship, the trierarch its stores and tackling, and in some cases provisions and pay. In return the trierarch was captain of the ship. This arrangement is closely analogous to that financial arrangement in England by which, after the Revolution, local regiments were raised, clothed, and officered by wealthy men, who had in return the colonelcy of the regiment, and the right of appointing its subordinate officers.

The liability to these charges, distributed, as it seems, at the discretion of the Government, was a serious charge on the wealthy. Hence, when the state fell on evil days, and reverses had impoverished the Athenian people, persons were allowed to club together in order to supply these public functions. To abandon them would have been to incur the wrath of the gods, or imperil the safety of the state. The modern critics of Greek sentiment are amazed at the fact that only on the very eve of the great crisis in which the fate of Greece was finally determined, the battle of Chaeronea, Athens reluctantly devoted the taxes which had hitherto been employed for ecclesiastical purposes to the pressing necessities of the public defence. The theorie fund was that portion of the revenues of the state which was assigned to those sacred purposes. It was distributed nominally among the spectators as the price of tickets for admission. It actually was paid over to the managers of those public buildings in which the ceremony was performed.

If the person on whom the duty of supplementing the charges of the state was imposed conceived that he was unfairly selected, or asserted that his means were inadequate for the purpose, he was allowed to name another citizen to whom he could proffer an exchange of property. In this offer the other was bound to acquiesce, unless he consented to allow himself to be substituted for the individual on whom the duty was originally set. In short, the possession of property involved serious liabilities in Athens, though it seems that men of substance gloried in the satisfaction of these public charges, and completely conformed themselves to public opinion. For it will be found to be a fundamental law in successful finance that those imposts are always found to be most productive which are most in accord with public opinion, and that in the selection of a system of taxation it is not always possible to adopt that which is most expedient or even most just, but that which can be most readily enforced and is most willingly accorded.

But the most remarkable illustration of Athenian opinion in matters of finance is the regular property tax. In the costly services which have been sketched above, some compensation was afforded to the contributor by the position he occupied. The choragus was the chief official in rank at those religious ceremonies in which the drama was the highest act of worship; the chief of the gymnasts exercised authority over his staff of competitors in the public games, and was even empowered to compel parents to allow their children to take part in the contest. The man of substance on whom the state imposed the duty of equipping, manning, and provisioning a hull was captain of the vessel, and though he was liable to a due performance of his service, and subject to an audit on the termination of his year of office, he exercised full authority during his command, and might be, indeed was, rewarded for exceptional diligence and smartness during the period of his office.

The property tax was a contribution which did not make the tax payer conspicuous, and did not confer on him any distinction. The impost dates from the earliest records of the Athenian constitution. It was graduated, being a heavier percentage in the case of the richer citizens than in that of the middle classes. It passed through several notable changes, always, however, in the same direction, the particulars of which are well given in Boeckh’s Public Economy of Athens. But the principles of the assessment are very simple, though the process by which the result was finally arrived at is somewhat artificial.

The property of every Athenian citizen was assessed, whether it were movable or immovable, and the amount was entered in a public register. The assessment included the value of slaves, manufactured goods, and raw materials. A register of the assessment was open for examination, and undoubtedly re-valuations were frequent. The state was informed as to the property which each citizen— and indeed every resident alien—possessed, and made this property the basis of direct taxation. It then proceeded to divide all assessments into several schedules, assuming in each schedule a variable quantity, varying from a fifth to a tenth, as the taxable property of the individual. On this sum it levied a fixed rate. Thus, if a very wealthy man possessed an estate valued at 500 talents, i.e., nearly £122,000, his taxable wealth was treated as £24,400, and a five per cent, tax, £1220, exacted from him; while the owner of property valued at 25 mime, t.e., about £101, 10s., the lowest sum apparently which was liable to property tax, found his property assessed for purposes of taxation at £10, 3s., and his property tax of five per cent, at a little over 10s.

In the budget speech which the great statesman of the Athenian empire delivered before the commencement of the Peloponnesian war, and of which Thucydides gives us the heads, we learn that the revenue of Athens from the contributions cf her allies amounted on an average to 600 talents (£147,250) a year, and that there was an existing accumulation of treasure in coined silver amounting to a million and a half sterling, besides other immediate resources. It is to be regretted that the historian did not supply us with further particulars as to the finance of his country during the period of her greatest wealth and power. These resources, had Athens merely carried on a defensive warfare, would, as the statesman justly argued, have rendered the country not only unconquerable, but practically invulnerable.

The high rate of interest, and the general insecurity of society, excluded the states of ancient Greece from having recourse to regular loans, though not from attempting to meet current exigencies by anticipations of revenue. Occasionally portions of the revenue were assigned to creditors; sometimes the public lands were granted for a term, during which the principal and interest might be repaid. Instances may even be found in which the state issued a currency of tokens, which fulfilled some of the functions of state paper in modern times. Another financial expedient, always followed by the most mischievous consequences, was occasionally adopted, the issue, namely, of a debased currency. But from this fraud Athens always kept herself free, not only inflicting the punishment of death on those who put base money into circulation (the criminal code of Athens having been generally very lenient), but abstaining in her deepest distress from the temptation of supplementing her revenues by the temporary issue of base money So studious was Athens of her reputation in this respect that, when she was the home of the fine arts, she continued to maintain the clumsy archaic type of her coinage, although the arts of die-sinking and coining were carried to perfection in states which were far less scrupulous.

The revenue of Rome in the earlier ages of the republic was derived from the lands of the state, payments in kind or money from subjects, from import and export duties, and a few taxes on products and articles of luxury. Partly as compensation for the loss of the national domain, partly as a means of checking discontent, the state, in the later ages of the republic and the beginning of the empire, undertook the maintenance of its poorer citizens, either by gratuitous distributions of corn, or by the sale of food at low fixed prices. Cicero calculates the charge incurred by the revenue in consequence of this expedient at one-fifth of the public expenditure. Augustus increased the charges of maintaining these state paupers till the cost amounted to more than half of what had been the revenue of republican Rome. The emperor Vespasian declared (Suet., Vesp. 16) that the necessities of government in Rome required a sum of £400,000,000 sterling, apparently after the destructive civil war which preceded the elevation of the Flavian family to the throne. But the manner in which the revenue of the Roman empire was collected was even more destructive than the crushing weight of the charge itself.

The collection of taxes in Rome, both under the republic and the early empire, was entrusted to contractors, who purchased by auction the right of levying the tax. The character of the Roman contractor is aptly illustrated by Livy, who narrates the frauds practised by those persons on the Roman treasury during the deepest distresses of the second Punic war, and the violence with which other contractors defended the interests of the order in general, and the convicts in particular. But after the Macedonian war, the Roman citizen was relieved from direct taxes, the weight of which fell on the provincials. Associations of wealthy men were formed, who could give security to the Government, and who, being protected by the Government, could practice what extortion they pleased on the provincials. The law, indeed, provided that such persons should be liable to prosecution for corrupt and illegal practices, but the law was far too weak to check the malpractices of the officials. It appears that the province was divided into districts, or dioceses, as they are called, a manager being appointed for each district, who was in regular correspondence with the chief of the office at Rome. The law recognized the guild of the publicans, who were indeed, by their agency, the centre of the Roman system of finance, and in many emergencies the parties with whom the state negotiated for an advance on the security of its revenues. But, on the other hand, it was said with too much truth that where the tax-gatherer appeared public law and private liberty vanished.

Taxes paid in kind were the tenth of corn and the fifth of fruit. Such taxes were imposed in Sicily, in Africa, in Sardinia, and in Egypt. Spain was treated more generously, partly to compensate for the reputed unproductiveness of its soil, partly in all likelihood from fear of the high-spirited character of its inhabitants. In some cases, the contributor of the tithe had to carry his quota to the nearest port for shipment to Rome. The rest of the empire paid money taxes, partly from an assessment on the value of property, partly by what appears to be a poll tax, but was really an artificial estimate, under which several needy persons might be made to represent a unit, and on the other hand one wealthy person might be treated as many units. The assessment lasted for a definite period, which, in the age of Constantine at least, got the name of the Indiction. In the sense of a tax, this term is as old as Pliny, if indeed it cannot be carried back to the early empire.

The finance of the Roman empire imposed a tax on the profits of trade, which seems to have been collected with great severity, and to have exposed those who were...