TAXATION IN GENERAL 1 43 



"Downfall of the Roman Empire," of the "intolerable 

 weight of taxes attached to the land." How full of 

 warning for all ages are the words of Lactantius, the 

 Latin rhetorician, when referring in this particular to the 

 fall of the Roman Empire. " Thanks to the multitude of 

 functionaries, there were more tax-consumers in the 

 empire than tax-payers,' so that the cultivator was ruined 

 by the exactions to which he was exposed. Fields were 

 deserted, and lands once tilled were abandoned, till they 

 lapsed again into the forest." Another writer says that 

 " the treasury was a robbery which completed the fall of 

 the Roman Empire." 



In the years in which the lands of Great Britain were 

 passing from the control of the small landholders, the 

 burden of taxation rested upon land. Indeed, we ven- 

 ture the assertion, that all through the ages since the 

 organization of society, the principal state burdens have 

 in some way been thrown upon the tillers of the soil 

 whenever they could be so applied. In our time a 

 piteous wail comes ever and anon from the tax-ridden 

 peasants of Italy, France, and Germany. Of this unfor- 

 tunate class in Russia, " a former resident " writes : 



" The peasants are financially ruined ; the worst off 

 are dying, literally dying, of hunger, while others have 

 scarcely any thing to eat, or to drink, or the where- 

 withal to protect their bodies from the cold, and 

 yet their last cow that fed the children, innocent of 

 mother's milk, is distrained for taxes, and they them- 

 selves flogged in order to extract from them the money 



' The central government at Washington embraces, in the Internal 

 Revenue, Post-office, and other departments under its control, 130,000 

 officials, and its numbers are constantly increasing. If the number of 

 officials multiply in Canada for the next fifty years as they have during 

 the last twenty, they v^^ill comprise a body of tax-consumers not much 

 fewer than the tax-payers. 



