tops, and which bespeaks not only free labour, but the love of a peasant proprietor for his own land.
Solomon imposed, for his great works generally, a tribute of bond-service on the nations of alien blood which were under his sway.[1] But to build the Temple, he raised a great levy out of all Israel:[2] and it must have been a levy of freemen, since we are expressly told that “of the children of Israel Solomon made no bondmen.” It is not probable, then, that he had a great amount of slave labour at his command. Nor, though his palaces were great and costly, did he or his successors indulge in Pyramids, Labyrinths, Towers of Belus, or any of those wasteful freaks of despotic architecture which a great command of slave labour naturally inspires. The description of the Temple, grand and sumptuous, but without anything colossal or monstrous, bespeaks the work of freedom, which spares labour and seeks effect, not by magnitude, but by art.[3] When the Temple is repaired, under Josiah, the work is done by free labourers receiving wages. “Go up to Hilkiah the high priest, that he may sum the silver which is brought into the house of the Lord, which the keepers of the door have gathered of the people: and let them deliver it into the hand of the doers of the work, that have the oversight of the house of the Lord: and let them give it to the doers of the
