entitled to resume them, and the occupier had to pay the tenth sheaf,
or in oil and wine the fifth part of the produce, to the exchequer.
This was simply the -precarium- already described(2) applied to the
state-domains, and may have been already in use as to the public land
at an earlier period, particularly as a temporary arrangement until
its assignation should be carried out. Now, however, not only did
this occupation-tenure become permanent, but, as was natural, none but
privileged persons or their favourites participated, and the tenth and
fifth were collected with the same negligence as the grazing-money.
A threefold blow was thus struck at the intermediate and smaller
landholders: they were deprived of the common usufructs of burgesses;
the burden of taxation was increased in consequence of the domain
revenues no longer flowing regularly into the public chest; and those
land-allocations were stopped, which had provided a constant outlet
for the agricultural proletariate somewhat as a great and well-regulated
system of emigration would do at the present day. To these
evils was added the farming on a large scale, which was probably
already beginning to come into vogue, dispossessing the small agrarian
clients, and in their stead cultivating the estates by rural slaves;
a blow, which was more difficult to avert and perhaps more pernicious
than all those political usurpations put together. The burdensome and
partly unfortunate wars, and the exorbitant taxes and task-works to
which these gave rise, filled up the measure of calamity, so as either
to deprive the possessor directly of his farm and to make him the
bondsman if not the slave of his creditor-lord, or to reduce him
through encumbrances practically to the condition of a temporary
lessee of his creditor. The capitalists, to whom a new field was
here opened of lucrative speculation unattended by trouble or risk,
sometimes augmented in this way their landed property; sometimes they
left to the farmer, whose person and estate the law of debt placed in
their hands, nominal proprietorship and actual possession. The latter
course was probably the most common as well as the most pernicious;
for while utter ruin might thereby be averted from the individual,
this precarious position of the farmer, dependent at all times on the
mercy of his creditor--a position in which he knew nothing of property
but its burdens--threatened to demoralise and politically to
annihil