21
even the Great Desert, brings the Marroquin into close commercial relations with the Negro, and supplies the great Mohammedan kingdoms of the Soudan with the products of the Mediterranean. It proves also that the gold-fields of the Niger, so imperfectly known to us even now, were well known to the Carthaginians, and that the gold-dust with which the natives of Ashanti lately purchased the retreat of the European invader was the recognized medium of exchange in the days of the father of history.
"To defray the expenses of this vast system of exploration and colonization, as well as of their enormous armies, the most ruinous tribute was imposed and enacted with unsparing rigor from the subject native states, and no slight one either from the cognate Phœnician cities. The taxes paid by the natives sometimes amounted to a half of their whole produce, and among the Phœnician dependent cities themselves we know that the lesser Leptis alone paid into the Carthaginian treasury the sum of a talent daily. The tribute levied on the conquered Africans was paid in kind, as is the case with the rayahs of Turkey to the present day, and its apportionment and collection were doubtless liable to the same abuses and gave rise to the same enormities as those of which Europe has lately heard so much. Hence arose that universal disaffection, or rather that deadly hatred, on the part of her foreign subjects, and even of the Phœnician dependencies, towards Carthage on which every invader of Africa could safely count as his surest support. Hence the ease with which Agathocles, with his small army of fifteen thousand men, could overrun the open country, and the monotonous uniformity with which he entered, one after another, two hundred towns, which Carthaginian jealousy had deprived of their walls, hardly needing to strike a blow. Hence, too, the horrors of the revolt of the outraged Libyan mercenanaries, supported as it was by the free-will contributions of their golden ornaments by the Libyan women, who hated their oppressors as perhaps women only can, and which is known in history by the name of the 'War without Truce,' or the 'Inexpiable War.'
"It must, however, he borne in mind that the inherent differences of manners, language, and race between the natives of Africa and the Phœnician incomer were so great; the African was so unimpressible, and the Phœnician was so little disposed to understand, or to assimilate himself to his surroundings, that even if the Carthaginian government had been conducted with any equity, and the taxes levied with a moderation which we know was far from being the case, a gulf profound and impassable must probably have always separated the two peoples. This was the fundamental, the ineradicable weakness of
