ransported by the labour, or at the expense of the provincials, to the
imperial magazines, from whence they were occasionally distributed for
the use of the court, the army, and the two capitals, Rome and
Constantinople. The commissioners of the revenue were so frequently
obliged to make _considerable purchases_, that they were strictly
prohibited from allowing any compensation, or from receiving in money
the value of those articles which were exacted in kind."[35]

"Either from accident or design, the mode of assessment seemed to unite
the substance of a land to the form of a capitation-tax. The return
which was sent from every province and district expressed the number of
tributary subjects, and the amount of the public impositions. The latter
of these sums was divided by the former; and the estimate, that each
province and each head was rated at a certain sum, was universally
received not only in the popular but the legal computation. Some idea of
the weight of these contributions _per head_ may be formed by the
details preserved of the taxation of Gaul. The rapacious ministers of
Constantine had exhausted the wealth of that province, by exacting
twenty-five gold pieces (L12, 10s.) for the annual tribute of every
head. The humane policy of his successor reduced the computation to
seven pieces. A moderate proportion between these two extremes of
extravagant oppression and transient indulgence, therefore, may be fixed
at sixteen gold pieces, or about _nine pounds_ sterling, as the common
standard of the impositions of Gaul. The enormity of this tax is
explained by the circumstance, that, as the great bulk of the people
were slaves, the rolls of tribute were filled only with the names of
citizens in decent circumstances. The taxable citizens in Gaul did not
exceed 500,000; and their annual payments were about L4,500,000 of our
money; a fourth part only of the modern taxes of France."[36] The
ordinary land-tax in the eastern provinces was a tenth, though in some
cases it rose by the operation of the survey to a fifth, in others fell
to a twentieth of the produce. It was valued for a term of years, and
paid, unless when exacted in kind, commonly in money.[37]

There was one circumstance which rendered the direct taxes peculiarly
oppressive in the declining periods of the Roman empire, and that was
the _solid_ obligation, as the lawyers term it, which attached to the
municipalities, into which the whole empire was divided,