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588 of the legislator was punishable as a capital crime, and was held to include the double guilt of treason and sacrilege. If the results of personal interrogation under oath were not satisfactory to the tax officials, they were empowered to administer torture; and when personal stoicism or absolute incapacity failed to effect the desired results, resort was had to other, most abhorrent, and unnatural methods for procuring the sum at which their property was assessed—"the faithful slave being tortured for evidence against his master, the wife to depose against her husband, and the son against his sire. Neither age nor sickness exempted from liability and personal inquisition. In taking ages, they added to the years of children and subtracted from those of the elderly. When the number of cattle fell off and the people died, the survivors were obliged to pay the assessments on the dead." Zosimus, a historian who wrote in the early part of the fifth century, says that the approach of the fatal period when the general tax upon industry was to be collected "was announced by the tears and terrors of the citizens."

That the result, so far as the execution of the law was concerned, was a success, can not be doubted; nor that by the methods employed large amounts of revenue were collected that otherwise could not have been obtained. But what were the final results? First, a demonstration of an economic truth, which in subsequent years has over and over again been repeated, that the productiveness of a tax is not its first consideration; and that a blight contingent on the method of assessing and collecting a tax may ruin a harvest which it can not gather. Under the state of things, as described, that prevailed under the latter days of the Roman Empire, the agriculture of its provinces was gradually ruined. Long before the footsteps of the barbarians had been seen in Italy, a large part of what had been its most fertile portion and the seat of "the delicious retirement of the citizens of Rome," had become uncultivated and a desert. "The desire and possibility of accumulation languished, and men produced only what would suffice for their immediate needs; for the government laid in wait for all savings. Capital vanished, the souls of men were palsied; population fled from what was called civilization, and sought concealment and relief in barbarism and with barbarians. Men cried for social death, and invited the coming of savages; and in the form of Goths and Vandals, Huns and Herulii, Franks and Lombards, they came, and the empire of Rome and its degraded civilization went down in almost universal turmoil, bloodshed, robbery, and woe." There is also good reason for believing that the Turks were greatly indebted for their success in overthrowing the subsequent Byzantine or Greek Empire to their simple methods and policy in respect to taxation; and