sitions for shipping, for military stores and provisions, and for
defraying the expense of the praetor and his legates on the various
circuits they made for the administration of the province. This last
charge became frequently a means of great oppression, and several ways
were from time to time attempted, but with little effect, to confine it
within reasonable bounds.[25] Amongst the extraordinary impositions must
be reckoned the obligation they laid on the provincials to labor at the
public works, after the manner of what the French call the _corvee_, and
we term statute-labor.

As the provinces, burdened by the ordinary charges, were often in no
condition of levying these occasional taxes, they were obliged to borrow
at interest. Interest was then to communities at the same exorbitant
rate as to individuals. No province was free from a most onerous public
debt; and that debt was far from operating like the same engagement
contracted in modern states, by which, as the creditor is thrown into
the power of the debtor, they often add considerably to their strength,
and to the number and attachment of their dependants. The prince in this
latter case borrows from a subject or from a stranger. The one becomes
more the subject, and the other less a stranger. But in the Roman
provinces the subject borrowed from his master, and he thereby doubled
his slavery. The overgrown favorites and wealthy nobility of Rome
advanced money to the provincials; and they were in a condition both to
prescribe the terms of the loan and to enforce the payment. The
provinces groaned at once under all the severity of public imposition
and the rapaciousness of private usury. They were overrun by publicans,
farmers of the taxes, agents, confiscators, usurers, bankers, those
numerous and insatiable bodies which always flourish in a burdened and
complicated revenue. In a word, the taxes in the Roman Empire were so
heavy, and in many respects so injudiciously laid on, that they have
been not improperly considered as one cause of its decay and ruin. The
Roman government, to the very last, carried something of the spirit of
conquest in it; and this system of taxes seems rather calculated for the
utter impoverishment of nations, in whom a long subjection had not worn
away the remembrance of enmity, than for the support of a just
commonwealth.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] There is a curious instance of a ceremony not unlike this in a
fragment of an ancient Runic hi