In the larger cantons the public administration was for the most part incorrupt; and that of justice was liable on the whole to fewer complaints than in many other European countries. The pay of public servants, with few exceptions, was extremely moderate. Men who had devoted their whole lives to public affairs, and who had filled the highest offices in the state, lost more than they gained by the bounty of their country. At Zurich, the expenses of the government were wholly defrayed without the imposition of taxes, properly so called, from the revenues and interests of the national lands and capital, from ground-rents, tithes, the salt monopoly, and the produce of the premium paid by the several guilds of traders in return for their exclusive privileges. The same description is applicable to the government of Bern, excepting that here the course of justice was tedious and expensive. The superior financial resources of the latter canton enabled her to execute more for public ends than Zurich. Bern invested considerable sums in foreign securities, particularly in the English funds; and, besides, amassed a treasure amounting to some millions of dollars, which became, as we shall presently see, and as Mably had predicted, the booty of rapacious and powerful neighbours. Very different was the condition of the free or common bailiwicks, particularly those of the democratical cantons; here most of the land-vogts sought by every species of extortion to indemnify themselves for the sums for which they had in fact bought their places from the general assemblies of their respective cantons. Many made an open traffic of justice; took presents from both parties; helped delinquents to evade deserved punishment who could pay for exemption, and exacted contributions from the wealthier class whenever and wherever they could. Even farther than in the German domains of Switzerland were abuses of this kind carried in the Italian bailiwicks, and most of all in those of the Grisons. The inevitable tendency of such treatment was to debase the popular character in those districts, and its effects have left unequivocal traces even to this day. In those towns of which the constitution was grounded on corporate bodies, the privileges of the burghers and their guilds received progressive extensions. Propositions were made which would hardly have been conceivable in monarchical states, and could only, in fact, take place where particular classes had to decide upon the destiny of the rest of their fellow-countrymen. In Bâle it was several times proposed, under the pretext of protection to agriculture, that the exercise of certain manufactures should be prohibited altogether in the rural part of the canton.[c] FEDERAL RELATIONS OF THE SWISS STATES