Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/184

 174 FINANCE The Roman empire even anticipated the benevolences of the Plantagenet and Stuart kings of England in the coronary gold, which was first received as a present on the occasion of a triumph, but afterwards exacted as a right on such occurrences as the emperor might choose to proclaim. The distinction of Roman and provincial was merged in a common servitude under the edict of Caracalla, which conferred the Roman franchise upon all the subjects of the empire. The task of collecting and transmitting the taxes from the provinces to Rome, and subsequently to Con stantinople, was imposed on the decurions, the senate of the colonies. These persons exercised what little authority was left to the local magistracy by the centralization and despotism of the empire, and were exempted from some of the more degrading punishments which were imposed on the mass of the people. But they bought their rank and privileges at a dear rate. They were liable, in case they failed to collect it, to the whole impost which was assessed on the locality whose affairs they administered. To escape from the dignity and responsibility of the decurion s office, without sinking into the condition of an unprotected citizen, was the object of numerous petitions to the emperor. The privilege was occasionally, sometimes lavishly, awarded as a matter of special favour. But the necessities of the public revenue demanded that enough decurions should be left for the purpose of meeting the burden of taxation. Hence, under the financial system of the later empire, the weight of fiscal charges fell with increasing severity on the middle classes, so that at last, when the military system of Rome collapsed, nothing remained to withstand the assaults of the barbarian invaders. One is struck at finding how small are the armies which subverted the Roman empire, and how easily they occupied Gaul, Spain, and northern Italy. The fiscal and military system of the Roman empire caused the downfall of ancient civilization. The Roman army and the Roman exchequer were developments from a centralized despotism. The army exhausted the free growth of Italy, devoured the population of those most warlike races who were successively allowed to recruit the Roman legions ; and when the subject races, from which new blood could be introduced into the forces, were thoroughly drained, the Government was forced to enlist soliiers from those foreign hordes who were already threatening, and were soon about to overthrow the empire. Civil society was simultaneously crushed by a prodigious weight of taxation, arbitrarily imposed, and rigorously exacted. Before the final collapse occurred, wide regions, once occupied by opulent and populous cities, were found to be destitute of inhabitants, and released from taxation on the plea that there was no population left from which to collect a revenue. Large tracts of Asia, southern Europe, and northern Africa have never recovered from the desolating effects which were induced on them by the fiscal and military policy of im perial Rome. A great break occurred in the history of human progress. Social development was thrown back for centuries, and in some particulars has not even yet recovered the ground on which it stood in the first century before our present era. Not a few fragments, too, survive from that imperial system which was the downfall of ancient civilization, and which will remain an impediment to modern civilization until they are completely taken out of the societies in which they have been embedded. The history and progress of modern finance may be best studied in English fiscal history. Some countries, as Holland, adopted expedients in finance long before other states understood or accepted them; others, as France, have been informed by many acute authors of the means by which a sounder, fairer, and more productive fiscal system might be adopted in place of one which was ruinous, oppressive, and unproductive. But in England only theory and practice have gone on together, not indeed simultaneously, for the English legislature has accepted scientific principles with hesitation and slowness, but pro gressively, the result being a compromise, which is open indeed to serious criticism from the point of view of the economist, but is, under existing circumstances, of easy manipulation to the financier. Into the former of these we do not propose to enter; it will be treated under TAXA TION; but the latter can be presented from an historical point of view. English finance is historically connected with the founda tion and growth of the English exchequer. It is further divisible into two periods, one in which almost the whole income of the sovereign, acting for the state, was derived from direct taxation; another in which a continually increasing revenue has been obtained from the indirect taxation of consumable articles. The dividing line in these two systems is the civil war of the 17th century; and it may be affirmed confidently that nothing but the emer gencies of a great convulsion like that of the parliamentary war could have reconciled the English people to so total a change in the system of taxation as the adoption of the excise was. For more than a century after the compromise was effected, of which the perpetual or, as it was called at first, the hereditary excise was the outcome, the impost was detested. A generation has hardly passed away since offences against the excise have ceased to command public sympathy, and, despite the severity with which the law treated frauds on the revenue, have been looked on as venial acts, detection in which was rather thought unlucky than scandalous. We no doubt owe the change in public senti ment, in accordance with which frauds on the excise are considered criminal, to the happy change in the fiscal policy of the country, under which taxes are imposed for the purposes of revenue only, and are no longer seen to be protective or partial. The origin of the English exchequer is variously ascribed to William the Norman and his youngest son Henry I. It is certain that the great cadastre of Domesday Book, the terrier of inhabited England, was treated as the register of the exchequer, the authority of which, as a record of the crown s title to lands and services, and of the subjects tenure, was held in the exchequer court to be conclusive. It is also certain that whatever arrangement may have been made by the first and third Norman kings, the system was suspended during the troubles of Stephen s reign, and that the exchequer was reconstructed by Henry II. It appears, too, that the machinery of the exchequer was perfected by a family of clerical financiers, who held at once high dignities in the church and confidential offices in the state ; that they were, and avowed themselves to be, eager advo cates of regal rights ; and that they strove to extend, as far as possible, the liabilities and responsibilities of the subject towards the crown. They also found means by which the judicial powers of the crown, the protection which the powers of police wielded by the crown could afford to the subject, and even the validity of contracts were made the machinery for securing a revenue. The Norman and Plantagenet kings were not only the overlords of all their subjects, and therefore interested in the escheat of their estates by failure of heirs, but by far the largest landholders in the country. The royal estates were managed, at least in the 13th and 14th centuries, just as the estates of the nobles and gentry were. They were superintended by bailiffs, generally of very low social rank, and cultivated by customary and hired labour. The profits of the estate, as long as this system was continued, were paid into the exchequer by the bailiffs, and after the king ceased to cultivate land with his own stock and