his

eyes had he been able to trace out the results of taxation in all the innumerable furrows which it scours out, by long passage, in the condition of those who endure it. That the continual dropping wears the stone, is not more true than that taxation, ill-arranged and long-abiding, wears and frets the industry of a people, moulding it at length to employments which are frequently far from the most suitable to their powers, or the most remunerative.

Viewed in this light, we may claim for Sir Robert Peel's and, in its measure, for Mr. Gladstone's system of taxation, the meritand it is no slight one-of leaving the nation as much unrestricted as possible, in the development of its industry, by the heavy weight which past times and present needs render inevitable. When we compare the number of trades now liable to visits from the officers of the Inland Revenue' with those who used to be open to those of the 'Excisemen' at the beginning of the century, we can see at a glance how great has been the gain in this direction. Add to this the enormous impetus given to industry by cheaper food and cheapened materials, and we have the causes of a growth of power, great indeed, but, we may hope, yet capable of very considerable extension.

The very interesting tables at the close of Sir Stafford Northcote's volume show the progress as well as the incidence of taxation within the time which he was treated; and they record some facts, which perhaps might otherwise have been forgotten such, for instance, as that, in the years 1859-61, the revenue raised was only about a million and a half less than in 1856-7, the last and heaviest of Crimean-war expenditure : the next following year saw some remission, and the present time some more. Yet, including the outlay on fortifications, the expenditure of the present year is within a very few thousands of the sum raised by taxation in the year 1856-7, the highest that England has ever known.

The question naturally arises, Can this state of things last? Are we to go on continually with an Income Tax as regular an item in the Budget as the Čustoms? If we are not, where is the remedy to be found? The customs-duties, except under the pressure of some overwhelming necessity, scarcely admit of much enhancement. The excise, on such commodities as are still subject to it, would hardly bear to be raised; and few would recommend subjecting fresh or lately emancipated manufactures to its restriction.

The Minister who will untie, or cut, this Gordian knot, will be, we venture to think, the man who, after carefully revising the military and naval expenditure, will dare to reverse some of the policy of recent years, and, instead of relieving local tax

payers at the expense of the Consolidated Fund, will throw more of what are really local charges on the local ratepayer.

The whole expenses of education, which have such a marked tendency to expansion, those of prisons, police, &c., are surely rather local than state charges. These charges would necessarily have to be combined with a comprehensive measure on the Poor Law, enlarging the area on which the rates are to be levied, from the parish to at least the district or the county, and embodying measures to provide for the diminution of the pauper-class, by educating, in all cases, the children who have to be maintained, in industrial schools at a distance from the lowering influences of the workhouse.

6

The rate-in-aid which parishes in Lancashire and Cheshire are now, in certain circumstances, entitled, under Mr. Villiers' Act, to charge to their neighbours, is a partial working-out of this idea. Sooner or later, some plan of this nature will surely follow the relaxation of the strict laws of settlement which have taken place of late years. To the poor themselves the gain will be great; close' parishes will become unknown, and all the shifts and evasions by which one parish is benefited at the expense of those surrounding it will be at an end. The immediate outcry might arise, that the preventive check will be taken off; but it would be possible to guard against this by levying an extra local rate on the parishes or unions in which the charges exceeded a given ratio to the population. Also the including within the limits of taxation those places which now dishonestly contrive to evade their due share of the burden, would give considerable relief to the rest. Another source of relief to the ratepayer would arise from the fact, that when the area on which the rate is levied is enlarged, it would be highly improbable that the whole of the population within that limit would be suffering alike from distress. Now-a-days, when a town or parish is least able to afford it--when want of work and, simultaneously, want of profit afflict the inhabitants, it is taxed the highest. Then, when one place was suffering, it would be assisted by more flourishing neighbours, on whose prosperous backs the burden would scarcely be felt.

Under such a system, the present terrible distress in the Cotton Districts would be assisted, as is due, by the country at large-not by the hazardous interposition of State assistance, but by the free working of the natural organization.

Is it a vain vision to hope that, by some readjustment of this sort, coupled with an enlarged house-tax, it might be possible to free ourselves from the dangerous experiment of continuing the present Income Tax in days of peace?-leaving that perilous instrument again for a time disused in the storehouse of the

State, laying it aside till greater necessities call for severer efforts; when, we doubt not, the tax will be borne as patiently and heroically as it has been to the present time.

The statesman who will redeem the now forfeited pledge of the remission of the Income Tax may look for a high place in the honour of his country. To do so will be no easy task, and, to render his work enduring, he must join wise expenditure with judicious economy; he must work out with it that most difficult problem, Retrenchment, without diminution of usefulness.

To all who are interested in such endeavours, Sir Stafford Northcote's volume, especially the clear tables at the close, will be a useful help. Popular, from the nature of the subject, it can never be, but it will be well that it should be a carefully-read book.

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By

ART. V.-A History of the Romans under the Empire. CHARLES MERIVALE, B.D. late Fellow of S. John's College, Cambridge. Vol. VII. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green. 1862.

IT is a stately portrait gallery to which Mr. Merivale introduces us in his seventh and concluding volume. All the figures are august and royal, with the exception of the one which commences this new epoch of the Roman empire. The only perplexity which the very congruity of the mighty sovereigns thus presented to our gaze with the mighty destinies it was their lot to sway produces in us, arises from the existence, we are told, of a terrible spirit of decay which underlay the whole period of these seemingly great intellects' autocracy.

The sway of the Flavian House, Mr. Merivale thinks, broke the spell which the surpassing genius of Julius had cast over the Roman people. These princes rose simply on a military revolution. Their rivals certainly were in no appreciably greater degree the elect of the city than themselves; but Vitellius had been the master of Rome, and so his conqueror was, in appearance, originally the enemy of the capital and Senate. Yet the Sabine veteran-a true plebeian farmer, a short, stout, shrewd-looking rustic, as uncouth and as fond of sharp homely witticisms as President Abraham Lincoln-used the power, which the sword had bestowed, not only moderately, but with the semblance of moderation. The Senate, by this time, after experiencing the sway of a Caligula and a Nero, not to speak of a Vitellius, knew well enough that their tribune and princeps Senatus, their occasional consul, and still rarer censor, was something more than one of themselves; that the lord of the legions and master of the Roman world was master also of Rome. But they loved not to have this thing bruited abroad through the provinces; they did not like even to confess it to themselves. They felt it to be a necessity that the control of that vast dominion, menaced on all sides by hungry tribes or ambitious despots, and defended by warriors who might, at any moment, descend greedily to the easier spoil of their wealthy paymasters, should be in the hands of one man. But it was a matter of the most direct private interest with them, that their head and sovereign should treat them as his electors rather than as his courtiers; the riches and flatteries of Rome's subject territories were abundant enough to satisfy a horde of claimants—senators

as well as emperor; but, without a rigid maintenance of the forms of respect and even exaggerated deference, the provincials would, in the face of a degradation otherwise sufficiently manifest, have ceased to see in a travelling senator, or a proconsular governor, one of their sovereigns, rather than a man equally with themselves the subject and servant of the mighty monarch of the Palatine.

In this point, both Vespasian and Titus, with the princes who followed Domitian, gratified fully the cravings of their nobles. Partly, this was from the fact of their being themselves under the dominion of that same superstition, of which the senators took advantage in the case of the subject populations. But, independently of this, such a policy was almost a matter of necessity. The whole empire had grown up, like a coral reef, layer on layer, each additional accretion owing all its firmness, even all its substance, to the one source of life, the throbs of that mighty heart, which, while it absorbed into itself all native energy and self-dependence, communicated to the dead mass no fresh blood from itself to animate those shrunken veins, but only a sort of galvanic semblance of life-motion rather than breathing. A ruler, whatever the actual origin of his own supremacy, might well fear that any attempt to change the relations of things-even the appearance of ignoring the municipal theory of imperial government-would cause strange confusion, perhaps make the whole mechanically moving mass stand still. Besides having been himself brought up in the belief that the old republican idea and forms of government were the only true ones, he had, at all events, nothing else of which to avail himself, unless he betook himself to the weary task of creating a new idea, a far harder work than crushing a multitude of rivals.

The nobles at least, the practical politicians among them-the aspirants to office-gratefully accepted the self-made soldier, in whose election to the princedom they had had no part, in return for the readiness with which he had at once recognised their theoretical independence. They sneered at his avarice; but as this, which they called by that name, was the only resource which, in the supposed necessity for keeping an unruly set of idlers quiet by panis et circenses,' Roman political economists could discover, in place of Nero's readier machinery of confiscations, wealthy capitalists satisfied by a simple sneer their spite at being defrauded of imperial hospitality. They might imagine they even saw (and Mr. Merivale agrees with them somewhat unreasonably), in his wise and philanthropic schemes of national education, an astute plan for stealing the direction of the minds of the next generation; but they contented themselves with