artificially low prices, among the poor and idle masses of the imperial city; which practice, originally adopted under the republic, with a view of obviating popular discontent, and continued, with additions of oil and meat under the empire, finally became a cause of great anxiety to the emperors lest anything should interfere with the movement of grain, which was mainly by sea from Africa and Sicily. To insure regularity and efficient service, the state at first farmed out the right to transport the crops to certain wealthy individuals; and this inducement to enterprise proving insufficient, the Emperor Claudius gave a bounty for each successful trip of the grain fleet. The construction of ships was also encouraged by subsidies, and in this way there grew up a class of wealthy shipowners, whose profits and incentive to business were obtained from the state, and who by organization into an association (analogous to the modern trust) under the name of "Naviculari," with branches in every city or town in the provinces, and with wealthy and influential senators among its stockholders or patrons, attained to great prominence and influence in the third and fourth centuries.
Taxation, in at least one notable instance, was also employed by the Romans as an instrumentality for the correction of a social evil—namely, a disinclination on the part of wealthy citizens, in the latter days of the republic and throughout the whole period of the empire, to contract marriages, with a view of avoiding the cares and burdens of a family. To counteract this tendency, a tax ("æs uxorium") was imposed on bachelors, with a limitation ("lex Julia et Papia Poppæa") on the transmission of property by will or gift by the unmarried and the childless.[1]
The statesmen and administrators of Rome seem never to have given a thought to the desirability of encouraging industry, trade, or commerce among their own people, much less among the people they had subjugated. There was, throughout all their literature and laws, the contempt which brigands and barbarians entertain for honest industry, at least when that industry is not agricul-
- ↑ In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was well-nigh universal legislation of this kind, the most thoroughgoing specimens being a Spanish edict of 1623 and one of Louis XIV in 1666, which not only granted exemption from taxation, but positive subsidies in cash, as an inducement to early marriages. That the idea involved in such legislation has also found favor at the present time is shown by the fact that Prof. Richet, a German economist of repute, has recently proposed that in all systems of taxation the fathers of large families be favored, and that corresponding burdens be laid on those who contumaciously refrain from marrying; ignoring the fact that old Rome adopted and carried out this policy by measures much more drastic than the spirit of the present times would tolerate, and that the result is generally believed to have been a failure. It is also worthy of note, that at the present time, in the Canadian Province of Quebec, the fathers of the largest families receive bounties of public lands; the motive of which policy is unquestionably to bring the French Canadian element into the control of the Dominion Government.
