Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/659

Rh very small—so much so that it has been estimated that the labor of several individuals was required to supply even the necessary food of one inactive person. But as the people became exhausted, the demands of the government, contingent on the maintenance of an extravagant court and a large standing army of soldiers and officials, became greater, the severity in the methods of exaction increased, and in no two provinces was the authority of the government (sovereign) exercised in the same manner. With malignant ingenuity, and with a view of perfecting the control of the state over the individual, and doubtless more especially for facilitating the operation of the officials charged with the duty of collecting taxes, every man's position was fixed for him by the conditions of his birth. The son of a cultivator of the soil was chained, as it were, to the lands tilled by his father. The workmen in all other departments of industry were bound to their position for life, and when they died their places were taken by their sons. "If any one of them deserted his work, he was sought out, even to the remotest provinces, and ruthlessly dragged back to his post." If he failed to produce a prescribed result, the state intervened and forced its accomplishment. In making assessments for taxation, visible tangible property was enrolled with great minuteness by officers who corresponded to our modern assessors. The lands were measured by surveyors; their nature—whether arable or pasture, vineyards or woods—was distinctly reported; and an estimate was made of their value from their average produce for five years. Every new purchaser of land contracted all the obligations of former proprietors. Slaves and cattle were counted separately, and carefully reported for assessment; and by the Theodosian Code, which for the time was an almost universal law, death and confiscation of estate was the punishment to which every farming proprietor was liable who should attempt to evade taxation.

In respect to the assessment and collection of taxes on personal property, the accounts that have come down to us are most interesting, and ought to be full of instruction to legislators of the present day who believe in patterning tax administration after old and vicious experiences, so far as the changed conditions and ideas of civilization in the nineteenth century will admit. The proprietor of such property was, in the first instance, questioned under oath; and every attempt to prevaricate or elude the