PRINCIPLES OF TAXATION. 587 



very small so mucli so that it has been estimated that the labor of 

 several individuals was required to supply even the necessary 

 food of one inactive person. But as the people became exhausted, 

 the demands of the government, contingent on the maintenance 

 of an extravagant court and a large standing army of soldiers and 

 officials, became greater, the severity in the methods of exaction 

 increased, and in no two provinces was the authority of the gov- 

 ernment (sovereign) exercised in the same manner.* With ma- 

 lignant ingenuity, and with a view of perfecting the control of 

 the state over the individual, and doubtless more especially for 

 facilitating the operation of the officials charged with the duty of 

 collecting taxes, every man's position was fixed for him by the 

 conditions of his birth. The son of a cultivator of the soil was 

 chained, as it were, to the lands tilled by his father. The work- 

 men in all other departments of industry were bound to their po- 

 sition for life, and when they died their places were taken by their 

 sons. " If any one of them deserted his work, he was sought out, 

 even to the remotest provinces, and ruthlessly dragged back to 

 his post." t If he failed to produce a prescribed result, the state 

 intervened and forced its accomplishment. In making assess- 

 ments for taxation, visible tangible property was enrolled with 

 great minuteness by officers who corresponded to our modern as- 

 sessors. The lands were measured by surveyors ; their nature 

 whether arable or pasture, vineyards or woods was distinctly 

 reported ; and an estimate was made of their value from their 

 average produce for five years. Every new purchaser of land 

 contracted all the obligations of former proprietors. Slaves and 

 cattle were counted separately, and carefully reported for assess- 

 ment ; and by the Theodosian Code, which for the time was an 

 almost universal law, death and confiscation of estate was the 

 punishment to which every farming proprietor was liable who 

 should attempt to evade taxation. 



In respect to the assessment and collection of taxes on personal 

 property, the accounts that have come down to us are most inter- 

 esting, and ought to be full of instruction to legislators of the 

 present day who believe in patterning tax administration after 

 old and vicious experiences, so far as the changed conditions and 

 ideas of civilization in the nineteenth century will admit. The 

 proprietor of such property was, in the first instance, questioned 

 under oath ; and every attempt to prevaricate or elude the inten- 



* Alfred Rambaud. L'Empire Grec au Dixieme Siecle. 



f By a law of the Emperor Theodosius, in 438 a. d., it was provided that the fabricen- 

 ses (meaning thereby the workmen engaged in the fabrication of arms) "shall be so 

 closely bound to their appropriate duties that, worn out at last by their toil, they shall die 

 in the profession to which they were born both they and their children after them." {Co- 

 dex Tlieod., ii, 9, 4.) 



