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Updated: June 29, 2025
The sceptre had departed from Judah, and the lawgiver from between his feet. The high priesthood was a mere forfeit in the deals of Idumaean tetrarchs and Roman governors. The publicans were notorious for their exactions, their covetousness, their cheating and oppression of the people. Soldiers filled the country with violence, extortion, and discontent.
Habits of peace and industry have been neglected for the profession of arms, which was more suited to the disposition of the people and to the character of the times, and which has also tended to affect the revenue and to thin the population. The system of rent-oppression and extortion likewise, which has prevailed, has operated with the most injurious influence upon the country.
Next day the caravan itself came in, for we had lost time on the southern route; and the waggons, travelling by the Raton Pass, had made a good journey of it. We had no difficulty about their entrance into the country, with the proviso that we paid five hundred dollars of "Alcavala" tax upon each waggon. This was a greater extortion than usual; but the traders were compelled to accept the impost.
The flippancy and profligacy of Philip the Handsome, the extortion and insolence of his Flemish courtiers, had not been forgotten in Spain, nor had Philip the Second forgiven his grandfather for having been a foreigner.
His book is a most forcible and complete exposure of that horrible system of extortion, torture, and ruination which made a reformation or a revolution inevitable. Authors have often been compelled to eat their words, but the operation has seldom been performed literally.
The Roman Empire was ruled in the different provinces by selfish and dishonest adventurers, who tyrannized over the people, farmed out the revenues, bribed their favorites and defrauded their masters. Turkish Government or Persian Rule is to-day an organized system of extortion and oppression by unscrupulous Satraps.
The whole administration of The Mountains, and the Saharan oases of Tripoli, is conducted on the same principles of finance and extortion. I am lodged in the house of my camel-driver. They wonderingly admire everything I have. The greater part of these women never left their mountain-homes never saw a Christian or European before and this is the reason of their surprise at my appearance.
The institution of a standing commission regarding the exactions of magistrates in the provinces, occasioned by the frequency of complaints as to such cases, in 605, and the laws as to extortion following each other so rapidly and constantly augmenting its penalties, show the daily increasing height of the evil, as the Nilometer shows the rise of the flood.
Thereupon, Lemoal thinks the matter over, and deems it prudent to cover up his private extortion by a public one. Accordingly, he sends for M. Davilliers: "It is now essential for you to openly contribute one hundred and fifty thousand livres more for the necessities of the Republic. I will introduce you to the representatives to whom you should make the offer."
Passing, one after another, world-old cities now dwindled to decaying towns, and numberless canal-mouths, now fast falling into ruin with the fields to which they ensured fertility, under the pressure of Roman extortion and misrule, they had entered one evening the mouth of the great canal of Alexandria, slid easily all night across the star-bespangled shadows of Lake Mareotis, and found themselves, when the next morning dawned, among the countless masts and noisy quays of the greatest seaport in the world.
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