distributed the loan among their customers and friends.[7] By the second method, the government itself announced the loan and allotted it to the citizens according to their income, as recorded on the _estimo_, the security being in this case also the customs duties for a certain definite period. Instead of a percentage the contributors received a monopoly of salt, with the privilege of selling it to the retail dealers at an enhanced price. As the necessities of the State increased, other sources of revenue were looked for. In 1343 the hearth or fire tax was adopted (_fumanti_ or _focatico_). Before that attempts had been made to tax the clergy. In the war against Mastino della Scala, Lord of Verona, which ended in 1339, the loans amounted to 350,000 gold guilders, and exceeded the annual revenue from the excise by 50,000 guilders. The accumulation of the debt after the expulsion of the Duke of Athens necessitated the continuance of the _monte comune_, already mentioned, for the administration of the public debt. In the previous century, when payment of the debt due to the citizens became impossible, a ‘great book’ was opened, which in the course of forty years was superseded. During the war of 1325, against Castruccio Castracane, resort was had to similar means for raising money, and the Republic, being unable to pay the debt without borrowing again, established the _monte comune_. The interest paid was at the rate of five per cent., though at other times it reached as high as twenty-five.[8] At the beginning of the fifteenth century the taxation was continually rising, and in the war with King Ladislaus the whole of the income registered on the _estimo_ was charged with a tax of five per cent. for three years. Nonpayment of the tax was punished by exclusion from office. The defaulter’s name was entered in a register called the ‘looking-glass’ (_specchio_), whence the expression _netto di specchio_ applied to a man eligible for office. According to a regulation of 1421 no man was so eligible unless he, his father, or grandfather, had been regular in paying his taxes for thirty years.