exact tribute

For example, the Spanish conquistadores wished to exact tribute from Mexico’s defeated native populations, so they were very interested in the Aztec Empire’s tribute lists.

Like the famous troll in the Three Billy Goats gruff—who hid under a bridge he hadn’t built, and then demanded payment from innocent goats who simply wanted to get to the other side—patent trolls exact tribute from innocent users by suing them.

This was St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who, speaking of the ecclesiastical decoration of his time, paid the grotesques of church art the exact tribute they so often merit; probably the greater portion of what he saw has given place to succeeding carvings, though of precisely the same characteristics.

The value of the stocks and shares would collapse, and the credit of all those persons and institutions interested in such property would also be shaken or shattered, and the whole credit system, being thus at the mercy of alien governors only concerned to exact tribute, would collapse like a house of cards.

As England is not able to exact tribute or economic advantage, it is inconceivable that any other country, necessarily less experienced in colonial management, would be able to succeed where England had failed, especially in view of the past history of the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British Colonial Empires.