enforced, and in fifteen or twenty years the
empire has perhaps recovered itself. Progress is of course slow and
uncertain, where the empire has continually to be built up again from
its foundations, and where at any time a day may undo the work which it
has taken centuries to accomplish.

To discourage and check the chronic disease of rebellion, re-course is
had to severe remedies, which diminish the danger to the central power,
at the cost of extreme misery and often almost entire ruin to the
subject kingdoms. Not only are the lands wasted, the flocks and herds
carried off, the towns pillaged and burnt, or in some cases razed to the
ground, the rebel king deposed and his crown transferred to another, the
people punished by the execution of hundreds or thousands as well as by
an augmentation of the tribute money; but sometimes wholesale
deportation of the inhabitants is practised, tens or hundreds of
thousands being carried away captive by the conquerors, and either
employed in servile labor at the capital or settled as colonists in a
distant province. With this practice the history of the Jews, in which
it forms so prominent a feature, has made us familiar. It seems to have
been known to the Assyrians from very early times, and to have become by
degrees a sort of settled principle in their government. In the most
flourishing period of their dominion--the reigns of Sargon, Sennacherib,
and Esar-haddon--it prevailed most widely, and was carried to the
greatest extent. Chaldaeans were transported into Armenia, Jews and
Israelites into Assyria and Media, Arabians, Babylonians, Susianians,
and Persians into Palestine--the most distant portions of the empire
changed inhabitants, and no sooner did a people become troublesome from
its patriotism and love of independence, than it was weakened by
dispersion, and its spirit subdued by a severance of all its local
associations. Thus rebellion was in some measure kept down, and the
position of the central or sovereign state was rendered so far more
secure; but this comparative security was gained by a great sacrifice of
strength, and when foreign invasion came, the subject kingdoms, weakened
at once and alienated by the treatment which they had received, were
found to have neither the will nor the power to give any effectual aid
to their enslaver.

Such, in its broad and general outlines, was the empire of the
Assyrians. It embodied the earliest, simplest, and most crude concepti