short essay of Hermes Verbesserung des Münzwesens, are among the first that occur to us as unquoted. Perhaps, however (except in questions which respect the law of nations), the statesman does well to appear to be governed by domestic ad vice, even when he avails himself of foreign illuminations. Nations execute with more pleasure, and vaunt with more pride, those laws and regulations, for which they suppose themselves indebted to native in, tellect. ART. XXVI.-Considerations on the best Means of insuring the internal Defence of Great Britain. By CAPTAIN BARBER, commanding the Duke of Cumberland's Corps of SharpShooters. 8vo. pp. 63. THIS accomplished officer advises a compulsory training to the use of arms of our whole male population between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. He is not for beginning young enough. The Athenians set about teaching the military exercises at sixteen. The supple limbs of adolescence more easily acquire the arts of warfare; and the captatious fancy of lads is more easily attracted to the business. The growth of the body ought not to be completed, when any given employment is first undertaken; because the muscles chiefly called into action will else not accommodate and proportion themselves to the requisite exertion, and not assert in their organization a preference of vigour and mobility. Compulsion is a grievous, and ought therefore to be a late resource, By a tax on apprentices, shopkeepers, footmen, students, clerks, waiters, journeymen, and other occupations of the young-to be levied by taking out a licence, and withdrawing it in favour of those who attend a given number of musters-all the desirable and expedient indirect compulsion may be brought to bear. The rich would decline the trouble, unless for the sake of the rank of officers. This is well. The habits of the luxurious unfit them necessarily for the camp, and for the hardships of efficacious military effort. They would die of disease in the seasoning Rheumatism and dysentery make bad fusileers. Let the opulent be induced to keep aloof from a service which they would injure. Play, or pay. Our army is the worse for being officered by so elevated a class. The French army has been improved precisely by being vulgarly commanded. Generals have often coarse work to do; soldiers always: the repng. nance of educated natures would baffle success. The greatest warrior among modern sovereigns was Frederic of Prussia, and the greatest blackguard. The troops of Pompey were gentlemen, and were beaten : Cæsar had the mob, and the victory. Under the later emperors the Ro man discipline declined fastest when it was most most genteel to hold a commission. The barbarians supplanted the refined Italians and Greeks. The military virtues are unnatural to the well-bom. Rank should be fought for, not sold. Excellence in war deserves the highest recompences of the state; but it is a kind of worth, which sagacity will seek on the lower, not the upper steps of the social pyramid. Captain Barber seems aware of this: he says, p. 53, "I believe this statement to be correct, that the volunteer corps, which are considered the most genteel, have much worse musters than such as are composed of the ordinary classes." He strenuously recommends black belts, browned muskets, ordinary hats, and cropped hair, to all volunteers: and he especially insists on the multiplication of the sharp-shooters. Their peculiar efficacy against invaders is justly noticed. Perhaps the privilege of killing game, without the expence of a licence, or the necessity of a qualification, ought to be conceded, as a patriotic encouragement, to every member of a rifle-corps. ART. XXVII.—Observations on the Duty on Property. By the Rev. L. HESLOP, Archdeacon of Bucks. 8vo. pp. 37.1 SEVERAL persons in this country are friends of taxation in the abstract, and affect to think every seizure of individual property for public purposes is a meritorious act in the state, and a victory of general over personal interest. If this prin ciple were carried to the utmost, nothing would be left in the possession of the subject, but the means of paying for his yearly subsistence; and the whole super fluity of his earnings, and the whole ac cumulation of his economy, would be confiscated under the forms of law, and squandered in those speculative armaments and distant expeditions, by which ministers contrive to annihilate the many millions they levy. To this dangerous sect of tax-admirers belongs the reverend author of the pamphlet before us. He assures us that the property-tax is just, because the duty to be paid is in proportion to the property to be protected. It follows that all proportioned taxes, however needless, are just. He also assures us that this tax is politic, because the object of our insatiable enemy is not only conquest and dominion, but to plunder and seize the whole property of the kingdom to enrich himself. It follows that all taxes whatever are politic, provided our enemy is as insatiable as our ewn exchequer. Such is the marvellously admirable and convincing reasoning of this learned archdeacon. He tells us further, that the exemptions and abatements under the property-act extend too far; and proposes a number of new rules for eroding and diminishing these deductions. He thinks, and truly, that the occupiers of land are privileged against their share of this tax in an unfair and unwise degree; which facility given to the landed interest is, like the successful opposition to the horse-tax, a natural consequence of the large proportion of land-owners who sit in both houses of parliament. He finally treats of the duty on tythes, which is considerably the most intelligible portion of the book, If the tythe were every where converted into a modus; and such modus allowed to be redeemed by individual proprietors at their pleasure, after the manner in which the old land-tax was extinguished, the difficulty of ascertaining and assessing duly this vast source of income would be sensibly alleviated. ART. XXVIII. Treatise upon Tythes; containing an Estimate of every tytheable Article in common Cultivation: with the various Modes of compounding for the same. By the Rec. JAMES BEARBLOCK, A. M. 8vo. pp. 73. MODERATION, as it is called, has hitherto been characteristic of the English clergy with vast rights over the produce of the soil, they have been content to compound for a moderate portion of their dues, and to accept, instead of kind, which varies in value, a certain yearly allowance less than equivalent. There is much of virtue, something of ignorance, and something of indolence, in this conduct. A grey-coat parson, such is the nick-name given to a lay-proprietor of tythe, usually exacts more than his contiguous ordained brother. This treatise will operate diffusively to abolish clerical moderation. It will dispel the ignorance, and relieve the indolence, of those who are moderate from helplessness. It teaches, in a simple intelligible form, the art of rendering tythe productive. It provides arithmetical tables for casting up, by the bushel, the value of wheat, rye, and barley, of oats, beans, and pease; for casting up hay by the load, and potatoes by the ton. The art of composition, not for homilies, but for salary, is instructively inculcated, under its several subdivisions of composition by valuation of crop, by annual agreement, and by permanent modus. Nor is timber forgotten; or the strange exaction on the earnings of industry, to which millers are exposed. This personal tythe, notwithstanding the intimation to the contrary in Burn's Ecclesiastical Law, we apprehend to be no part of the law of England: it is a second assessment of the same corn. Levitical law, which the clergy call divine right, refuses the tythe on subsidiary crops, and ordains the levy to be triennial. One good effect may flow from this book: by familiarizing the real value of the tythe, it will facilitate a just commutation. The redemption of the tythe, after the manner in which the old landtax was redeemed, might easily succeed to a commutation; the property of the church would then be embarked, where it ought to be, on the same security with that of the stock-holder. This would stabilitate the funds, and augment the national power of borrowing. ART. XXIX.-Thoughts on public Trusts. 8vo. pp. 203. THE Memoirs of Planetes are deservedly recollected for an Attic plainness of style, for close specific simple reasoning, for a classical range of idea, and a level ling philanthropy of sentiment. These thoughts on public trusts have originated with a pupil of the same school. They are likewise inferences from too exclusive a consultation of the scanty records of ancient experience: they have a similar neatness of garb, and an analogous more than republican tendency. As in Ogilvie's Essay on the Right to Property in Land, so to this author agrarian propositions appear worthy of legitimation. As in Condorcet's Constitution for France, so to this author the decision of the multitude in their local assemblages appears more conducive to the national interest than the concentred wisdom of elected deputies. The analysis of the government of ancient Rome is the text to which he attaches his political homily: in Rome, he manages to find models for the institutions he recommends: there was realized the social paradise he aspires to create anew. France is his bottomless pit, whence every deterring instance is updrawn, The first chapter gives, or professes to give, a cursory view of the Roman constitution, from the building of the city to the 385th year of the republic. What do we know of these early times? Nothing trustworthy. Herodotus, the earliest historian of the ancients, did not flourish before the fourth century of Rome, and he unfortunately had not travelled into Italy. At the close of that century Rome was taken by the Gauls, and burnt to ashes. The records, the public monuments, all perished. An anarchy of five years suspended every habit of authority and obedience. Camillus was the true founder of Rome; with him begins its credible history, and all the causes of its great ness. Festus gives us to understand that the antiquity of the city was computed from the number of nails found in a given wall; and that the driving in of one annually had supplied the place of annals, before the use of letters. Livy expressly testifies that the art of writing was very rare; and that the commentaries of the priests, as well as other public and private documents, had been burnt in the conflagration of the city by the Gauls. No possible source of intelligence could exist concerning the previous period. It was not until a decree of the senate, passed in the year 450, under the consulate of Publius Sulpitius Averrio and Publius Sempronius Sophus, that the Romans began to compile trustworthy public records: this decree withdrew from the priesthood, and placed under the civil magistrate, the care of the archives. Fasti were at that time forged by one Cneius Flavius, in the name of Numa, and were then first promulgated and engraved on brass. Plutarch, in his life of Numa, quotes the testimony of the chronologer Clodius, to prove the falsification of these pretended documents; and the judgment of Polybius assents to the same fact. Archives taken from the priesthood, in the year 450, must have been taken from them, because they were imperfectly kept; it is likely that the very lists of consuls, back to the year 388, when the dictatorship of Camillus terminated, were found incom plete. The previous lists of military t bunes, if authentic, ought to pass for a census of the army of Camillus, which resettled Rome; that is, for cotemporary names, rather than for a pedigree of the republican magistracy. The pretended historical notices of the times before Camillus being thoroughly insupportable, no inferences from exper ence may be founded on the study of that period. In the year of Rome 620, Tiberias Gracchus proposed to revive the execution of a law of Licinius, enacted in 385, which was said to have limited the agra rian property of citizens to five hundred acres. This was an attempt to supersede the prescriptive rights of property on a ground of statute law; and may be compared with certain English attempts to confiscate without indemnity those burgage-tenures, which are avowedly venal, in defiance of institution; or to annul sales of advowsons, which ecclesiastical prejudice considers as simoniacal. It was more strictly an attempt to convert a landtax into a rent-tax, on the ground that the original land-tax had been proportioned to the rental. Confiscations have seldom been scrupled by non-proprietors. Until the commercial forms of property had be come numerous; until it was perceived that these forms of property, which are very moveable, immediately fly from the land where they are not superstitiously respected; the doctrine of the inviolabi lity even of property, founded on mere prescription, was little thought of. Bit the habit of possession, and the threatened interruption of that habit, were felt then, as now. Tiberius Gracchus, instead of being refuted, was resisted in arms; and was murdered by the party, whose possessions he threatened to disturb. After this event, our author thinks the govern ment of Rome too disorderly to furnish precedents for legislation: so that to a narrow period of little more than two hundred years must be restricted the exemplary portion of the Roman annals. During these only two pattern-centuries the form of the Roman constitution is quite uncertain. Hear our author. "Historians seem to have been also inaccurate in stating the manner of appointing senators. Some of them say positively, that when the first hundred were appointed, each of the three tribes chose three, each of the thirty curia chose three, and that Romulus chose one; and when another hundred were 2lded, upon incorporating the Sabines, it is expressly said that they were chosen by the people; yet others say that the kings, and afterwards the consul and censors, had the power of nominating the senators. It is probable that this seeming contration was owing to the notoriety of the prople's power at the time, which made historians think it necessary to mention it in ery case. For the same reason they frequently call a law, the law of a certain con, yet they do not mean that he enacted it.. In like manner, when a king is said to appoint enators, they mean that he presided at the meeting; and suppose it to be understood, that the votes, or approbation of the people, determined the matter, as in the case of enacting laws. That such is their meaning appears more certain when we reflect, that Livy, and other early historians, use, indifferently, both modes of expression. But what is most conclusive, none of the historians have denied the authenticity of those narratives which sate, that the people elected the senators, nd pointed out the particular manner of flecting the first hundred, which they would nave done, if they had supposed that those arratives contradicted their own accounts of these transactions. "We are therefore to suppose, that the Roman historians understood these expres stons, that the king, consul, or censor, nomiated senators, as implying, that it was done either with the actual votes, or with the concurrence of the people. That the power of the people in that matter was so well known, that the mode of expression, could not be misunderstood; as English historians, for the same reason, frequently call an act of parlament, an act of the king or his minister. Though the votes of the low ranks were of no use when taken by centuries, yet their presence in the assemblies was necessary, to port their tribunes, who had a legal right stop public proceedings. It was by that power, and by their forming a legal head to the plebeians, that the tribunes were enabled to force the patricians (after many violent al tercations, and being frequently on the brink of civil war), to yield up all the exclusive privileges which they had usurped when the consular office was established, and which they had acquired by the new method of voting; to allow the poorest Roman an equal vote with the richest in enacting laws, and to be equally eligible to offices, which had been the constant practice in Rome, from the building of the city until the method of taking the votes by centuries was established.” Here is a theory of the Roman constitution, which begins by imputing inaccuracy to the historians. The writer is himself aware that he does not talk from his book. The routine of office among the Romans was this. A public character first solicited to become questor. In the early ages this was a mere collector of the taxes in latter times it corresponded with a receiver of the revenue. fitable office, and founded for the holder It was a proa permanent prosperity. The lenient quætor became popular, and could pursue a tribuneship, which was conferred by the universal suffrage of the citizens. The strict quæstor acquired the support of the government-party, or optimates, and could period conferred by corporations, called pursue an edileship, which was for a long centuriate assemblies. The edile was expected to bleed freely, and to carry through his office a magnificence proportioned to his supposed profits. The splendid edile became prætor, a civil magistrate, The respectable prætor became consul, a military magistrate. Where lay the nomination of the quæstors? Clearly, we apprehend, with the consuls for Tacitus tells us, that until the year 307 the mere nomination by the consul was a valid election. Where lay the election of the quæstors afterwards? Clearly, we apprehend, with the comitia tributa. In many of our county elections the poll is taken by hundreds; the resibooth. If at such elections the majority dents in each hundred voting at a peculiar of each hundred told as a single vote, and the election was decided by the majority of hundreds, this mode of voting would resemble the comitia tributa. The tribunes, and latterly the ediles, were elected in the same manner. But the higher offices of the state, those to have served which bestowed for life a seat in the senate, were in the gift of the centuries, or comitia centuriata. And what were the centuries? An arrangement of the Roman people depending on the amount of their income-tax. The non-payers formed collectively but a single company, or century. Those whose income was rated at 124 thousand pence of brass, were divided into thirty centuries; each of which companies decided by an internal majority, like the tribes in the other form of election, concerning any candidate, or law, and gave in their corporate capacity one vote: so that this class had thirty votes. Those whose income was rated at 25 thousand pence of brass were divided into twenty centuries; so were those whose income was rated at 50 thousand; and so were those who income was rated at 75 thousand: these three classes had in all sixty votes. Those whose income exceeded 100 thousand pence of brass were divided into eighty centuries. Here is a list of only 181 centuries: but mention occurs of 192 centuries having voted: it is probable, therefore, that the equestrian order was separately divided into centuries; and, as round numbers prevail in the whole arrangement, that it was divided into 20 centuries: making in all 200 centuries, beside the class of non-payers, which, in case of equal division, had a casting vote. As soon as the men of 100 thousand, and the men of 75 thousand, had polled; if they were nearly unanimous, an election was decided. The appeal was made to a lower and a lower class, only in proportion to the dividedness of opinion among the optimates. The Roman constitution, therefore, as far as respected the higher grades, or the election of prætors, consuls, and senators, was a government by property or rather by those forms of property which contributed to the reve mues of the state. He who thinks this government practically good (we think it at every period of the Roman history disorderly and oppressive), ought to advise, in Great Britain, the transfer of the choice of both houses of parliament to the payers of the income-tax; and that the number of votes, or quantity of influence, entrusted to an individual, should be proportioned to the amount of his assessment. Instead of such very practicable change in our institutions, this writer suggests the following plan of constitution: "Divide the country into provinces of such extent, that the most populous shall not contain: above 1,500,000 souls; and in the least populous, that few of the inhabitants be above forty miles, or a day's journey, from the place of provincial meetings. Each province to be divided into districts of such extent as that there shall be at least four or five districts in the provinces of the least extent; and in the least populous parts, few of the inhabitants should be above fifteen miles from the district meetings, that they may go home in the evening. Lists to be made up of all the men in each province above forty years of age. Every three hundred of these, living most contiguous to form a ward, and to meet in a church, or some other convenient place, on a certain day annually, to elect two provincial senators, and one warden or judge for the ward. These three officers must be forty years of age, and resident in the ward for which they are elected, or in one that is adjoining. These ward voters also to elect, at the same time, a vicewarden and sixteen jurymen, each forty years old, and resident in the ward. "The wardens, vicewardens, and jurymen of every twenty contiguous wards in the na cial senators, two men to be national senation, to elect out of their respective provin tors; these to continue to be also provincial senators. "The great national officers to be elected by all the senators, wardens, vicewardens, and jurymen of the nation, annually, the votes to be taken in their respective districts. These men to elect a consul, a viceconsul, and also such a number of generals, admirais, superintendants of the revenue, of the navy, of the ordnance, and such other national officers as the senate may judge necessary. "The senators, wardens, vicewardens and jurymen of each province, to elect annually one of the senators of the province to be governor; also to elect two judges, a public prosecutor, and colonels and majors of mi litia for the province. "The senators, wardens, vicewardens, and jurymen of each district to elect annually one of their senators to be prefect or governor; and also to elect captains, lieutenants, and ensigns of militia for their district. "In towns of more than one ward, the senators, wardens, vicewardens and jurymen, to elect one of the senators or wardens to be chief magistrate. "It is usual to choose the generals of brigades from the colonels; but as the merits of colonels of militia cannot be known to all the magistrates of a nation, it seems to be proper, that the magistrates of two or three adjoining provinces should elect the generals of brigade. This method may also be adopted for electing other public officers whose sphere of action is local, and whose conduct can only be known in the neighbourhood, such as superintendants of public stores, of building ships, &c. care being always taken that the number of electors be so great as to prevent them from making it a job. "As it is necessary that the society shall prevent, with jealous care, any man or set of men, from acquiring absolute power over ther persons or property; they should be at all times prepared to defend themselves agaust internal or external enemies, by being properly organized, and regularly exercised as militia, in some prudent rotation till a certain age. "When a standing army is judged neces sary, the officers may be elected by the same persons who elect the officers of militia. "Method of conducting public business. |