588 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. ' 



tions of the legislator was punishable as a capital crime, and was 

 held to include the double guilt of treason and sacrilege. If the 

 results of personal interrogation under oath were not satisfactory 

 to the tax officials, they were empowered to administer torture ; 

 and when personal stoicism or absolute incapacity failed to effect 

 the desired results, resort was had to other, most abhorrent, and 

 unnatural methods for procuring the sum at which their property 

 was assessed "the faithful slave being tortured for evidence 

 against his master, the wife to depose against her husband, and 

 the son against his sire. Neither age nor sickness exempted from 

 liability and personal inquisition. In taking ages, they added to 

 the years of children and subtracted from those of the elderly. 

 When the number of cattle fell off and the people died, the sur- 

 vivors were obliged to pay the assessments on the dead." Zosi- 

 mus, a historian who wrote in the early part of the fifth century, 

 says that the approach of the fatal period when the general tax 

 upon industry was to be collected " was announced by the tears 

 and terrors of the citizens." 



That the result, so far as the execution of the law was con- 

 cerned, was a success, can not be doubted; nor that by the 

 methods employed large amounts of revenue were collected that 

 otherwise could not have been obtained. But what were the final 

 results ? First, a demonstration of an economic truth, which in 

 subsequent years has over and over again been repeated, that 

 the productiveness of a tax is not its first consideration ; and 

 that a blight contingent on the method of assessing and collecting 

 a tax may ruin a harvest which it can not gather. Under the state 

 of things, as described, that prevailed under the latter days of the 

 Roman Empire, the agriculture of its provinces was gradually 

 ruined. Long before the footsteps of the barbarians had been 

 seen in Italy, a large part of what had been its most fertile por- 

 tion and the seat of " the delicious retirement of the citizens of 

 Rome," had become uncultivated and a desert. " The desire and 

 possibility of accumulation languished, and men produced only 

 what would suffice for their immediate needs ; for the govern- 

 ment laid in wait for all savings. Capital vanished, the souls of 

 men were palsied ; population fled from what was called civiliza- 

 tion, and sought concealment and relief in barbarism and with 

 barbarians. Men cried for social death, and invited the coming 

 of savages ; and in the form of Goths and Vandals, Huns and 

 Herulii, Franks and Lombards, they came, and the empire of 

 Rome and its degraded civilization went down in almost universal 

 turmoil, bloodshed, robbery, and woe." There is also good reason 

 for believing that the Turks were greatly indebted for their suc- 

 cess in overthrowing the subsequent Byzantine or Greek Empire 

 to their simple methods and j)olicy in respect to taxation; and 



