an two
millions and a half of our money, but which was afterwards considerably
improved by the more exact economy of the Romans, and the increase of
the trade of AEthiopia and India. Gaul was enriched by rapine, as Egypt
was by commerce, and the tributes of those two great provinces have been
compared as nearly equal to each other in value. The ten thousand Euboic
or Phnician talents, about four millions sterling, which vanquished
Carthage was condemned to pay within the term of fifty years, were a
slight acknowledgment of the superiority of Rome, and cannot bear the
least proportion with the taxes afterwards raised both on the lands and
on the persons of the inhabitants, when the fertile coast of Africa was
reduced into a province.

Spain, by a very singular fatality, was the Peru and Mexico of the old
world. The discovery of the rich western continent by the Phnicians,
and the oppression of the simple natives, who were compelled to labor in
their own mines for the benefit of strangers, form an exact type of the
more recent history of Spanish America. The Phnicians were acquainted
only with the sea-coast of Spain; avarice, as well as ambition, carried
the arms of Rome and Carthage into the heart of the country, and almost
every part of the soil was found pregnant with copper, silver, and gold.
* Mention is made of a mine near Carthagena which yielded every day
twenty-five thousand drachmns of silver, or about three hundred thousand
pounds a year. Twenty thousand pound weight of gold was annually
received from the provinces of Asturia, Gallicia, and Lusitania.

We want both leisure and materials to pursue this curious inquiry
through the many potent states that were annihilated in the Roman
empire. Some notion, however, may be formed of the revenue of the
provinces where considerable wealth had been deposited by nature, or
collected by man, if we observe the severe attention that was directed
to the abodes of solitude and sterility. Augustus once received a
petition from the inhabitants of Gyarus, humbly praying that they might
be relieved from one third of their excessive impositions. Their whole
tax amounted indeed to no more than one hundred and fifty drachms, or
about five pounds: but Gyarus was a little island, or rather a rock, of
the AEgean Sea, destitute of fresh water and every necessary of life, and
inhabited only by a few wretched fishermen.

From the faint glimmerings of such doubtful and scattered lights,