y public
authority, and be arranged according to some reasonable measure, and
rest on the motive of benefiting the social organisation.

The citizens therefore who are elected to settle the incidence of
taxation must be careful to take account of the income of each man, and
so manage that on no one should the burden be too oppressive. He
suggests himself the percentage of one pound per hundred. Nor, again,
must there be any deliberate attempt to penalise political opponents, or
to make use of taxation in order to avenge class-oppression. Were this
to be done, the citizens so acting would be bound to make restitution to
the persons whom they had thus injured.

Then St. Antonino takes the case of those who make a false declaration
of their income. These, too, he convicts of injustice, and requires of
them that they also should make restitution, but to the State. An
exception to this, however, he allows. For if it happens to be the
custom for each to make a declaration of income which is obviously below
the real amount, then simply because all do it and all are known to do
it, there is no obligation for the individual to act differently from
his neighbours. It is not injustice, for the law evidently recognises
the practice. And were he, on the other hand, to announce his full
yearly wage of earnings, he would allow himself to be taxed beyond the
proper measure of value. But to refuse to pay, or to elude by some
subterfuge the just contribution which a man owes of his wealth to the
easing of the public burdens, is in the eyes of the Archbishop a crime
against the State. It would be an act of injustice, of theft, all the
more heinous in that, as he declares with a flash of the energy of
Rousseau, the "common good is something almost divine."

We have dwelt rather at length on the schemes of this one economist, and
may seem, therefore, to have overlooked the writings of others equally
full of interest. But the reason has been because this Florentine
moralist does stand so perfectly for a whole school. He has read
omnivorously, and has but selected most of his thoughts. He compares
himself, indeed, in one passage of these volumes, to the laborious ant,
"that tiny insect which wanders here and there, and gathers together
what it thinks to be of use to its community." He represents a whole
school, and represents it at its best, for there is no extreme dogmatism
in him, no arguing from grounds that are purely arbitrary, or from