252 POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



later times the lesson was repeated. While internal peace and 

 its blessings were achieved in medieval France as fast as feudal 

 nobles became subordinate to the king while the central 

 power, as it grew stronger, put an end to that primitive prac 

 tice of a blood-revenge which wreaked itself on any relative 

 of an offender, and made the &quot; truce of God &quot; a needful miti 

 gation of the universal savagery ; yet from this extension of 

 political organization there presently grew up evils as great 

 or greater multiplication of taxes, forced loans, groundless 

 confiscations, arbitrary fines, progressive debasements of 

 coinage, and a universal corruption of justice consequent on 

 the sale of offices : the results being that many people died 

 by famine, some committed suicide, while others, deserting 

 their homes, led a wandering life. And then, afterwards, 

 when the supreme ruler, becoming absolute, controlled social 

 action in all its details, through an administrative system vast 

 in extent and ramifications, with the general result that in 

 less than two centuries the indirect taxation alone &quot; crossed 

 the enormous interval between 11 millions and 311,&quot; there 

 came the national impoverishment and misery which resulted 

 in the great revolution. Even the present day sup 



plies kindred evidence from sundry places. A voyage up the 

 Nile shows every observer that the people are better off 

 where they are remote from the centre of government that 

 is, where administrative agencies cannot so easily reach them. 

 Nor is it only under the barbaric Turk that this happens. 

 Notwithstanding the boasted beneficence of our rule in India, 

 the extra burdens and restraints it involves, have the effect 

 that the people find adjacent countries preferable: the ryots 

 in some parts have been leaving their homes and settling in 

 the territory of the Nizam and in Gwalior. 



Not only do those who are controlled suffer from political 

 organization evils which greatly deduct from, and sometimes 

 exceed, the benefits. Numerous and rigid governmental 

 restraints shackle those who impose them, as well as those on 

 whom they are imposed The successive grades of ruling 



