072

THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF

Among nations of shepherds, where the sovereign or chiefis only the greatest shepherd or herdsman of the horde orclan, he is maintained in the same manner as any of his vas-sals or subjects by the increase of his own herds or flocks.Among those nations of husbandmen who are but just comeout of the shepherd state, and who are not much advancedbeyond that state; such as the Greek tribes appear to havebeen about the time of the Trojan war, and our German andScythian ancestors when they first settled upon the ruins ofthe western empire; the sovereign or chief is, in the samemanner, only the greatest landlord of the country, and ismaintained, in the same manner as any other landlord, by arevenue derived from his own private estate, or from what, inmodern Europe , was called the demesne of the crown. Ilissubjects, upon ordinary occasions, contribute nothing to hissupport, except when, in order to protect them from the op-pression of some of their fellow-subjects, they stand in needof his authority. The presents which they make him uponsuch occasions constitute the whole ordinary revenue, thewhole of the emoluments which, except perhaps upon somevery extraordinary emergencies, he derives from his dominionover them. When Agamemnon , in Ilomer, offers to Achillesfor his friendship the sovereignty of seven Greek cities, thesole advantage which he mentions as likely to be derivedfrom itwas, that the people would honour him with presents.As long as such presents, as long as the emoluments of jus-tice, or what may be called the fees of court, constituted inthis manner the whole ordinary revenue which the sovereignderived from his sovereignty, it could not well be expected,it could not even decently be proposed, that lie should givethem up altogether. It might, and it frequently was proposedthat he should regulate and ascertain them. But after theyhad been so regulated and ascertained, how to hinder a per-son who was all-powerful from extending them beyond thoseregulations, was still very difficult, not to say impossible.During the continuance of this state of things, therefore, thecorruption of justice, naturally resulting from the arbitraryand uncertain nature of those presents, scarce admitted ofany effectual remedy.

But when from different causes, chiefly from the continu-ally increasing expense of defending the nation against theinvasion of other nations, the private estate of the sovereignhad become altogether insufficient for defraying the expense