[Sidenote: Difference between taxation and robbery.] I say, then, the most essential feature of a government--or at any rate the feature with which it is most important for us to become familiar at the start--is its power of taxation. The government is that which taxes. If individuals take away some of your property for purposes of their own, it is robbery; you lose your money and get nothing in return. But if the government takes away some of your property in the shape of taxes, it is supposed to render to you an equivalent in the shape of good government, something without which our lives and property would not be safe. Herein seems to lie the difference between taxation and robbery. When the highwayman points his pistol at me and I hand him my purse and watch, I am robbed. But when I pay the tax-collector, who can seize my watch or sell my house over my head if I refuse, I am simply paying what is fairly due from me toward supporting the government. [Sidenote: Sometimes taxation _is_ robbery.] In what we have been saying it has thus far been assumed that the government is in the hands of upright and competent men and is properly administered. It is now time to observe that robbery may be committed by governments as well as by individuals. If the business of governing is placed in the hands of men who have an imperfect sense of their duty toward the public, if such men raise money by taxation and then spend it on their own pleasures, or to increase their political influence, or for other illegitimate purposes, it is really robbery, just as much as if these men were to stand with pistols by the roadside and empty the wallets of people passing by. They make a dishonest use of their high position as members of government, and extort money for which they make no return in the shape of services to the public. History is full of such lamentable instances of misgovernment, and one of the most important uses of the study of history is to teach us how they have occurred, in order that we may learn how to avoid them, as far as possible, in the future. [Sidenote: The study of history.] When we begin in childhood the study of history we are attracted chiefly by anecdotes of heroes and their battles, kings and their courts, how the Spartans fought at Thermopylae, how Alfred let the cakes burn, how Henry VIII. beheaded his wives, how Louis XIV. used to live at Versailles. It is quite right that we should be interested in such personal details, the more so the better; for history has been made by individual men and women, and until we have understood the character of a great many of those who have gone before us, and how they thought and felt in their time, we have hardly made a fair beginning in the study of history. The greatest historians, such as Freeman and Mommsen, show as lively an interest in persons as in principles; and I would not give much for the historical theories of a man who should declare himself indifferent to little personal details.