ent
brother would, therefore, be an irreparable loss.

The king was so much pleased with the novelty and unexpectedness of
this turn of thought, that he gave her the life of her son in addition
to that of her brother. All the rest of the family circle of
relatives and friends, together with Intaphernes himself, he ordered
to be slain.

Darius had occasion to be so much displeased, too, shortly after his
accession to the throne, with the governor of one of his provinces,
that he was induced to order him to be put to death. The circumstances
connected with this governor's crime, and the manner of his execution,
illustrate very forcibly the kind of government which was administered
by these military despots in ancient times. It must be premised that
great empires, like that over which Darius had been called to rule,
were generally divided into provinces. The inhabitants of these
provinces, each community within its own borders, went on, from year
to year, in their various pursuits of peaceful industry, governed
mainly, in their relations to each other, by the natural sense of
justice instinctive in man, and by those thousand local institutions
and usages which are always springing up in all human communities
under the influence of this principle. There were governors stationed
over these provinces, whose main duty it was to collect and remit to
the king the tribute which the province was required to furnish him.
These governors were, of course, also to suppress any domestic
outbreak of violence, and to repel any foreign invasion which might
occur. A sufficient military force was placed at their disposal to
enable them to fulfill these functions. They paid these troops, of
course, from sums which they collected in their provinces under the
same system by which they collected the tribute. This made them, in a
great measure, independent of the king in the maintenance of their
armies. They thus intrenched themselves in their various capitals at
the head of these troops, and reigned over their respective dominions
almost as if they were kings themselves. They had, in fact, very
little connection with the supreme monarch, except to send him the
annual tribute which they had collected from their people, and to
furnish, also, their quota of troops in case of a national war. In the
time of our Savior, Pilate was such a governor, intrusted by the
Romans with the charge of Judea, and Matthew was one of the tax
gatherers employed t