722 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The period when the molecules of society seem to have begun 

 to combine anew, is generally assigned by historians to the eleventh 

 century, when feudalism had become systematized into something 

 analogous to general government, and the power of the Church 

 was especially manifesting itself ; and was recognized to such an 

 extent that it was able to establish throughout nearly all Europe 

 a period known as " God's Truce," when warfare, plunder, and 

 bloodshed were forbidden from sunset on Wednesday to sunrise 

 on Monday ; and " during the Christmas holy days and Lent no 

 new defenses were to be erected, nor old ones repaired. But this 

 was not all. The provisions made for the protection of the 

 laborer and for the produce of labor were far more characteristic 

 of the dawning of a new era. Peasants in hostile territories were 

 not to be injured or confined ; the tools of agriculture, the hay 

 and the grain stacks and the cattle, were all taken under the 

 protection of the Church ; and if seized, it must be for use and 

 not for destruction. He that violated this truce was placed under 

 censure of ecclesiastical power." From this period, therefore, it 

 is only practicable to take up anew the thread of history, and 

 attempt to resume the relation of some of the most instructive 

 incidents that have since characterized the attempts of govern- 

 ments to defray their expenditures by levies upon the persons 

 and property of their subjects or citizens. Preliminary, how- 

 ever, to so doing, the following historical facts may properly find 

 a place. 



How THE DRUIDS COLLECTED REVENUE. An annual payment 

 in the nature of a tax was exacted by the ancient Druids from 

 every family for the benefit of the priests of the temple in the 

 district in which the family lived. The families were obliged, 

 under penalty of an ecclesiastical curse, to extinguish their fires 

 on the last evening of October, and attend at the temple with a 

 prescribed annual payment. This being made, they were entitled 

 to receive, on the first day of November, some of the sacred fire 

 from the altar, to rekindle the fires of their houses; and their 

 neighbors were also forbidden, under a similar penalty, in any 

 way to assist them. The result was, that delinquent taxpayers 

 found themselves not only interdicted from the society of their 

 fellow-men and from justice, the usual sequence of ecclesiastical 

 excommunication, but also from the use of fire during the ap- 

 proaching winter. This expedient for collecting a revenue was 

 referred to by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a 

 speech in Parliament in 1871, in connection with a proposal to 

 tax matches; and the motto, Ex luce lucellum, was proposed to 

 be inscribed on match boxes in case the tax was enacted.* 



* Toland's History of the Druids, quoted by Dowell, in History of Taxation in England. 



