In the second period of Athenian ascendency, after the fall of the Thirty Tyrants and of Sparta, when the virtual pensioning of citizens begun by Pericles had been carried to still further lengths,[267] we find Xenophon, the typical Greek of culture and military experience, proposing a financial plan[268] whereby Athens, instead of keeping up the renewed practice of oppressing the confederate cities in order to pay pensions to its own poorer citizens, should derive a sufficient revenue from other sources. In particular he proposed (1) the encouraging of foreigners to settle in the city in larger numbers, by exempting them from military service and from all forms of public stigma, and by giving them the waste grounds to build on. The taxes they would have to pay as aliens would serve as revenue to maintain the citizens proper. (2) A fund should be established for the encouragement of trade which in some unexplained way should yield a high interest, paid by the State, to all investors. (3) The State should build inns, shops, warehouses, and exchanges, chiefly for the use of the foreigners, and so further increase its revenue. (4) It should build ships for the merchant trade, and charter them out upon good security. (5) Above all, it should develop by slave labour the silver mines of Laurium, to the yield of which there was no limit. The public, in fact, might there employ thrice as many slaves as the number of citizens; and it should further set about finding new mines. We have here the measure of the Athenian faculty to solve the democratic problem as then recognised. The polity of Pericles was bound to perish, alike because it negated international ethics and because it had no true economic basis. The comparatively well-meaning plan of Xenophon could not even be set in motion, so purely fanciful is its structure. The income of the poorer citizens is to come from the taxes and rents paid by foreigners, and from mines worked by slave labour; the necessary army of slaves has to be bought as a State investment. It is as if the Boers of the Transvaal had proposed to live idly in perpetuity on the dues paid by the immigrants, all the while owning all the mines and drawing all the profits. It is hardly necessary to say, with Boeckh,[269] that the thesis as to the yield of the mines was a pure delusion; and that the idea of living on the taxation of foreigners was suicidal.[270] The old method, supplemented perforce by some regular taxation of the taxable citizens, and by the special exaction of "liturgies" or payments for the religious festival drama and other public services from the rich, was maintained as long as might be; industry tending gradually to decay, though the carrying trade and the resumed concourse of foreigners for a time kept Athens a leading city. Never very rich agriculturally, the middle and upper classes had for the rest only their manufactures and their commerce as sources of income; and as the manufactures were