ON LAND TENURE IN ANCIENT TIMES. 179 
the empires which surrounded it—“ swept away the produce 
of the labour of the Village-Communities and carried off the 
young men to serve in their wars, but did not otherwise 
meddle with the cultivating societies. .. . These monarchs 
with few and doubtful exceptions neither legislated nor 
centralised. The Village-Communities were left to modify 
themselves separately in their own way. 
If itis asked how, under such a state of society, the nu- 
merous oriental court officials and the nobility were main- 
tained, the answer is, plainly, in the same way as they were 
provided for by the Mohammedan Emperors of Delhi and the 
Mahratta princes who divided the Mogul Empire, or the 
still more modern Sikhs, “not by rents, but by assignments 
of the royal revenue.” To acquire the necessary means for 
this, when their armies were large and their courts magnifi- 
cent, Eastern monarchs were driven to sweep into ‘their 
coffers a large and extortionate share of the produce of the 
soil tilled by their subjects in the Village-Communities, 
leaving the latter only a bare subsistence. There is every 
reason to believe that this state of things existed in the days 
of the kings of Judah and Israel, and it adds a graphic touch 
to the picture of the greed, insolence, and consequent punish- - 
ment of the young courtiers and nobles brought up with 
Solomon’s son, whom it will be seen had a direct interest in 
advising Rehoboam to declare that the fiscal burdens of the 
people, which had been already unbearably oppressive in the 
last days of his father’s reign, should be increased rather than 
diminished.* 
It follows, from what has been said, that there was no 
such thing as rent, in our sense of the term, in former times 
when the cultivating tribal groups prevailed. Sir H. 8. 
Maine tells us the terrible problem of pauperism “began to 
press on English statesmen as soon as the old E nglish’ culti~ 
vating groups began distinctly to fall to pieces.” In India, 
he points out, it will be worse, because there is so little 
mineral fuel for manufactures on a large scale, and “ emigra- 
tion for the most part is regarded as a mortal sin.” In fact, 
so long as the requirements of life were extremely simple, so 
long as even the poorest people knew their pedigrees and 
paid homage to a local patriarchal ruler, so long as lands 
were but sparsely peopled and not as yet completely brought 
under cultivation, so long as a powerful despotism safe- 
guarded the country from foreign aggression without making 
* | Kings xi. 1—14. 
