of making good
the amount of their fixed assessment to the public treasury. Of course,
if the municipality was declining, and the same quota required to be
made up from its assessable inhabitants by the magistracy, who were
responsible for its amount, it augmented the burden on those who
remained within its limits; and if they dwindled, by public calamities
or emigration, to a small number, it might, and often did become of a
crushing weight. This system is general over the East; and its
oppressive effect in the declining stage of states, is the chief cause
of the rapid decay of Oriental empires. There is a remarkable authentic
instrument, which attests the ruinous influence of this system in the
later stages of the Roman dominion. This is a rescript of the Emperior
Majorian, which sets forth:--"The municipal corporations, the lesser
senates, as antiquity has justly styled them, deserve to be considered
as the heart of the cities, and the sinews of the Republic. And yet so
low are they now reduced, by the injustice of magistrates and the
venality of collectors, that many of their numbers, renouncing their
dignity and their country, have taken refuge in distant and obscure
exile." He strongly urges, and even ordains their return to their
respective cities; but he removes the grievances which had forced them
to desert the exercises of their municipal functions, by directing that
they shall be responsible, not for the _whole sum_ assessed on the
district, but only for the payments they have actually received, and for
the defaulters who are still indebted to the public.[38] But this humane
and wise interposition was as shortlived as it was equitable. Succeeding
emperors returned to the convenient system of making the municipal
corporations responsible for the sum assessed on their respective
districts, and it continued to be the general law of the empire down to
its very latest day. Sismondi, in his _Decadence de l'Empire Romaine_,
and Michelet, in his _Gaule sous les Romains_, concur in ascribing to
this system the rapid decline and depopulation of the empire in its
later stages.

But although there can be no question that the conclusions of these
learned writers are in great part well founded, yet this system of
taxation by no means explains the decline and fall of the Roman empire.
It requires no argument, indeed, to show, that such a system of solid
obligations, and of levying a certain sum on districts without any
re