On the other hand, in the case of the Romans, who had little sensitiveness as to the manner in which public revenue or private wealth was attained, the publicans who collected the customs were held in high honor, and were characterized as the flower of the nobility ("flos equitum Romanorum").
Another point of interest in connection with this immediate subject, and one which has been generally overlooked, is that the answer which Jesus gave to the Jews, who put to him the question, "Is it lawful to give tribute to Cæsar?" namely, "Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's"—expresses a fundamental principle in political economy, in that it enjoins payment on the part of citizens or subjects of such tribute (taxes) as the government (typified by Cæsar) under which they live, may lawfully be entitled to demand for its support; and at the same time withholds sanction from, and so by implication denies, the right of a government to take that to which it is not entitled (or which is not Cæsar's), which it does when it exacts tribute or taxes for any other purpose than its legitimate support, or, what is the same thing, for the benefit of individual or private interests. In other words, the answer recognizes a broad line of distinction between the rights of Cæsar, or the government, and other rights in respect to property; and indicates that Cæsar, or a government, can find no justification, in virtue of power to compel the payment of tribute or taxes, to appropriate property (of the people) under circumstances in which similar action on the part of a private citizen would be considered robbery.
The casual observer would hardly imagine that there was any relation between anthropology (the science of man) and taxation; and yet writers on the laws of nations from an early period, and economists of a later day,[1] have called attention to the circumstance that different races seem to possess different moral aptitudes for different forms of taxation. Thus it is claimed that in countries inhabited by the pure Germanic race, or its leading branches in Germany, Scandinavia, Great Britain, and the United States the desire and ability for self-government, and' the disposition to place authority near to the individual or in his town or locality, favors voluntary taxation and a great endurance of burden in view of the attainment of a right result; whereas among the Latin races the tendency is to concentrate all authority, and generally in a military form, in the state, and require passive submission to the exercise of it on the part of the people. Hence, general taxes on property and income, which require for their successful application a certain degree of loyalty, of pa-
- ↑ Macchiavelli and other Italian publicists in the seventeenth century, and M. de Parieu, a French economist, in 1855.
