The infinite increase in the power of the crown is then enhanced by a second creation of the system of payment in money, by _officialdom_. We have told in detail of the vicious circle which forced the feudal state into a cul-de-sac between agglomeration and dissolution, as long as its bailiffs had to be paid with “lands and peasants” and thereby were nursed into potential rivals of their creator. With the advent of payments in money, the vicious circle is broken. Henceforth the central government carries on its functions through paid employees, permanently dependent on their paymaster.[135] Henceforth there is possible a permanently established, tensely centralized government, and empires come into being, such as had not existed since the developed maritime states of antiquity, which also were founded on the payments in money. This revolution of the political mechanism was everywhere put into motion by the development of the money economy--with but one exception, as far as I can see, viz., Egypt. Here, according to the statement of experts, no definite information is to be had, and it seems that the system of money exchanges appears as a matured institution only in Greek times. Until that time, the tribute of the peasants was paid in kind;[136] and yet we find, shortly after the expulsion of the Shepherd Kings, during the New Empire (_circa_ sixteenth century B. C.), that the absolutism of the kings was fully developed: “The military power is upheld by foreign mercenaries, the administration is carried on by a _centralized body of officials_ dependent on the royal favor, _while the feudal aristocracy has disappeared_.”[137] It may seem that this exception proves the rule. Egypt is a country of exceptional geographic conformation. Jammed into a narrow compass, between mountains and the desert, a natural highway, the River Nile, traverses its entire length, and permits the transportation of bulky freight with much greater facility than the finest road. And this highway made it easy for the Pharaoh to assemble the taxes of all his districts in his own storehouses, the so-called “houses”[138] and from them to supply his garrisons and civil employees with the products themselves _in natura_. For that reason Egypt, after it has once become unified into an empire, stays centralized, until foreign powers extinguish its life as a “state.” “This circumstance is the source of the enormous and plenary power exercised by the Pharaoh where payments are still made in kind; the exclusive and immediate control of the objects of daily consumption are in his hand. The ruler distributes to his employees only such quantities of the entire mass of goods as appears to him good and proper; and since the articles of luxury are nearly all exclusively in his hands, he enjoys on this account also an extraordinary plenitude of power.”[139]