POLITICAL ORGANIZATION IN GENERAL. 151 



taxes, forced loans, groundless confiscations, arbitrary fines, progressive 

 debasements of coinage, and a universal corruption of justice conse- 

 quent on the sale of offices : the results being that many people died 

 by famine, some committed suicide, while others, deserting their homes, 

 led a wandering life. And then, afterward, when the supreme ruler, 

 becoming absolute, conti'olled social life in all its details, through an 

 administrative system vast in extent and ramifications, with the gen- 

 eral result that in less than two centuries the indirect taxation alone 

 " crossed the enormous interval between eleven millions and three hun- 

 dred and eleven millions," there came the national impoverishment 

 and misery which resulted in the great Revoultion. 



Even the present time supplies kindred evidence, in sundry places. 

 A voyage up the Nile shows every observer that the people are better 

 off where they are remote from the center of government where 

 administrative agencies can not so easily reach them. Nor is it only 

 under the barbaric Turk that this happens. Notwithstanding the 

 boasted beneficence of our rule in India, the extra burdens and the 

 complication of restraints it involves have the effect that the people 

 find some of the adjacent countries preferable; the' ryots in sundry 

 places are leaving their homes and settling in the territory of the 

 Nizam and in Gwalior. 



Not only do those who are controlled suffer, from political organi- 

 zation, evils which greatly deduct from, and sometimes exceed, the 

 benefits. Numerous and rigid governmental restraints shackle those 

 who imjjose them as well as those on whom they are imposed. The 

 successive grades of ruling agents, severally coercing grades below, 

 are themselves coerced by grades above ; and even the very highest 

 ruling agent is enslaved by the system created for the preservation of 

 his supremacy. In ancient Egypt the daily life of the king was mi- 

 nutely regulated alike as to its hours, its occupations, its ceremonies ; 

 so that, nominally all-powerful, he was really less free than a subject. 

 It has been, and is, the same with other despotic monarchs. Till lately, 

 in Japan, where the form of organization had become fixed, and where, 

 from the highest to the lowest, the actions of life were prescribed in 

 detail, the exercise of authority was so burdensome that voluntary 

 resignation of it was frequent. Adams writes, "The custom of abdi- 

 cation is common among all classes, from the Emperor down to his 

 meanest subject." European states have examplified this reacting 

 tyranny. " In the Byzantine palace," says Gibbon, "the Emperor was 

 the first slave of the ceremonies he imposed." Concerning the tedious 

 court life of Louis le Grand, Madame de Maintenon remarks : " Save 

 those only who fill the highest stations, I know of none more unfor- 

 tunate than those who envy them. If you could only form an idea of 

 what it is ! " 



So that, while the satisfaction of men's personal wants is furthered 

 both by the maintenance of order and by the formation of aggregate^ 



