Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/32

30 natives of Britain; and it was impossible that such a spectacle should have been long contemplated, and that the intercourse which must have existed between the two closely approaching coasts could have long gone on, without the ideas and habits of the formerly secluded islanders, semibarbarians themselves and encompassed by semibarbarians, undergoing some change. Accordingly, Strabo has intimated that, even in his time, that is to say, in the reign of Augustus, the Romkan arts, manners, and religion had gained some footing in Britain. It appears also, from his account, that, although no annual payment under the obnoxious name of a tribute was exacted from the Britons by Augustus, yet that prince derived a considerable revenue, not only from the presents which were made to him by the British princes, but also by means of what would certainly now be accounted a very decided exercise of sovereignty over the island, the imposition of duties or customs upon exports and imports. To these imposts, it seems, the Britons submitted without resistance; yet they must of course have been collected by functionaries of the imperial government stationed within the island, for it was a leading regulation of the Roman financial system that all such duties should be paid on goods exported before embarkation, and on goods imported before they were landed. If the duties were not paid according to this rule, the goods were forfeited. The right of inspection, and the other rights with which the collectors were invested to enable them to apportion and levy these taxes, were necessarily of the most arbitrary description; and they must have been even more than ordinarily so in a country where the imperial government was not established, and there was no regular superintending power set over them. Strabo says that a great part of Britain had come to be familiarly known to the Romans through the intercourse with it which was thus maintained.

All this implies, that the foreign commerce of the island had already been considerably extended; and such accordingly is proved to have been the case even by the catalogue—probably an incomplete one—of its