gard to the decline in the resources or number of those who were to
pay them, must, in a _declining_ state of society, be attended with the
most disastrous, and it may be in the end fatal consequences. But it
does not explain how society should be declining. _That_ is the matter
which it behoves us to know. When the reverse is the case--when industry
and population are _advancing_, the imposition of fixed tributes on
districts is not only no disadvantage, but the greatest possible
advantage to a state--witness the benefit of the perpetual settlement to
the ryots of Hindostan--or of a perpetual quit-rent to English
landholders. And that, bad as this system was when applied to a
declining state of society, it was not the cause of the ruin of the
Roman empire, and would not have proved injurious if the state had been
advancing, is decisively proved by several considerations.

1. In the first place, the taxes and system of municipalities, being
responsible for a fixed sum, was not confined to the European provinces
of the Roman dominion, viz.--Italy, Greece, Gaul, Macedonia, and
Romelia, where the progress of decay was so rapid, but it was the
general law of the empire, and obtained equally in Spain, Lybia, Egypt,
and Sicily; as in the provinces which lay to the north of the
Mediterranean. But these latter provinces, it has been shown, were, when
overrun by the barbarians about the year 400, not only nowise in a state
of decrepitude, but in _the very highest state of affluence and
prosperity_. They had become, and deserved the appellation of, "the
common granary of Rome and of the world." They maintained the
inhabitants of Italy, Greece, Rome, and Constantinople, by the export of
their magnificent crops of grain. Spain was at least twice as populous
as it is at this time, Lybia contained twenty millions, Egypt seven
millions of inhabitants. Sicily was in affluence and prosperity, while
the adjoining plains of Italy were entirely laid out in pasturage, or
returned to a state of desolation and insalubrity. It is in vain,
therefore, to seek a solution of the decline of the empire in a system,
which, _universally_ applied, left some parts of it in the last stages
of decrepitude and decay, and others in the highest state of prosperity
and affluence.

2. In the next place, the taxes of the empire were by no means at first
of such weight as to account, if there had been nothing else in the
case, for the decay of its industry. The