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L3 ANCIENT GREECE. [CHAK xsupply them ? How were those means brought together ?How administered? The inquiry respecting the economyof the Grecian states will be conducted with reference tothese questions.The small republicsof that people appear at the firstview, according to the modem criterion, to have hardly hadany wants, which could make a financial system necessaryand in fact there were some states, as Sparta during a longperiod, without any finances. The magistrates were rewarded with honour, not with a salary. The soldiers werecitizens, and not hirelings ;and many of those public institutions, which are now supported by the governments forthe most various purposes, and in part at very great expensewere then entirely unknown, because they were not felt tobe necessary.And yet we find that the burdens which the citizens ofthose republics had to support, continued gradually to increase ; especially at the epochs of the Persian wars, andthe Peloponnesian, and in the later period of Grecian liberty, they became very oppressive. States can createwants, no less than individuals. Even in Greece, experience shows that necessities are multiplied with the increaseof power and splendour. But when we call them oppressive,we must not forget,that the heaviness of the contributionspaid to the state, is not to be estimated by their absoluteamount; nor yet by the proportion alone, which thatamount bears to the income. In our present investigations,it is more important to bear in mind, what our moderneconomists have entirely overlooked, that in republicanstates (or at least more especially in them) there exists, beside the criterion of money, a moral criterion, by which ajudgment on the greater or less degree of oppressionis tobe formed. Where the citizen exists only with and for thestate ;where the preservation of the commonwealth is everything to the individual ;many a tax is easily paid, whichunder other circumstances would have been highly oppressive. But in the theories of our modern political artists,there isno chapter, which treats of the important influenceof patriotism and public spirit on the financial system ; probably because the statistical tables have no rubric for themas sources of produce.