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Updated: June 6, 2025
They were highly un-popular and great hate was also felt for the Hebrews who came to the land of Goshen to find a shelter after their long wandering through the desert and who helped the foreign usurper by acting as his tax-gatherers and his civil servants.
"What has chanced here?" asked Nehushta, in the Syrian tongue. "The Romans! the Romans! the Romans!" wailed the woman. "The head of our village quarrelled with the tax-gatherers, and refused to pay his dues to Caesar.
How I envy Lady Burdett for the fine opportunity she has to show the heroism of our sex! writes the daughter, who is only encountering angry tax-gatherers at home.... Somehow or other the bills are paid for the time, and the family arrangements go on as before.
The masses are ripe for revolt; even the bureaucracy know that now, and they try to gain time by raising side issues. Therefore, here in the country districts, they stir up the moujiks, now against the tax-gatherers, more often against the Jews. Murder and rapine follows; then the troops are sent, who punish indiscriminately, in order to strike terror into the people.
And the crowd is not satisfied with suspecting you; they declare, hard as iron, that you are the murderer. Monsieur Gilet is adored by all the people, who look at them! want to take justice into their own hands. Ah! didn't we see them, in 1830, dusting the jackets of the tax-gatherers? whose life isn't a bed of roses, anyway!"
But the parvenu of Arpinum the 'new man', as aristocratic jealousy always loved to call him is by no means insensible to the true honours of ancestry. Tax-gatherers and usurers are as unpopular now as ever the latter very deservedly so.
Thus there was no supervision over them in their exactions, for the government, being already paid, cared for nothing more. The consequence was, that the tax-gatherers, who were employed by the contractors, treated the people in the most oppressive and extortionate manner.
During these reigns of weakness and misgovernment, it was no doubt a cruel policy rather than humanity that led the tax-gatherers to collect the tribute in kind. More could be squeezed out of a ruined people by taking what they had to give than by requiring it to be paid in copper coin.
To European engineers the passes through these closed districts would offer no great obstacles in the construction of roads such as thread the Himalayas, but the Moors do not wish for the roads; for, while what the Government fears to promote thereby is combination, the actual occupants of the mountains, the native Berbers, desire not to see the Arab tax-gatherers, only tolerating their presence as long as they cannot help it, and then rising against them.
Hence there were many little towns, surviving by the grace of the Great Khan, that they might act as tax-gatherers and rob their neighbours for the benefit of the Tartar treasury. The state of Moscow, growing fat at the expense of the surrounding territory, finally became strong enough to risk open rebellion against its masters, the Tartars.
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