a class
reaches the summit it is recruited out of those who are mounting or
clambering up. Here, too, there is colossal wealth. It has been
calculated that the possessions of the princes of the royal family, the
Comtes of Artois and of Provence, the Ducs d'Orleans and de Penthievre
then covered one-seventh of the territory.[1210] The princes of the
blood have together a revenue of from 24 to 25 millions; the Duc
d'Orleans alone has a rental of 11,500,000.[1211]--These are the
vestiges of the feudal regime. Similar vestiges are found in England, in
Austria, in Germany and in Russia. Proprietorship, indeed, survives a
long time survives the circumstances on which it is founded. Sovereignty
had constituted property; divorced from sovereignty it has remained in
the hands formerly sovereign. In the bishop, the abbot and the count,
the king respected the proprietor while overthrowing the rival, and, in
the existing proprietor a hundred traits still indicate the annihilated
or modified sovereign.

III. Their Immunities.

Such is the total or partial exemption from taxation. The tax-collectors
halt in their presence because the king well knows that feudal property
has the same origin as his own; if royalty is one privilege seigniory
is another; the king himself is simply the most privileged among the
privileged. The most absolute, the most infatuated with his rights,
Louis XIV, entertained scruples when extreme necessity compelled him to
enforce on everybody the tax of the tenth.[1212] Treaties, precedents,
immemorial custom, reminiscences of ancient rights again restrain
the fiscal hand. The clearer the resemblance of the proprietor to the
ancient independent sovereign the greater his immunity.--In some places
a recent treaty guarantees him by his position as a stranger, by his
almost royal extraction. "In Alsace foreign princes in possession, with
the Teutonic order and the order of Malta, enjoy exemption from all real
and personal contributions." "In Lorraine the chapter of Remiremont
has the privilege of assessing itself in all state impositions."[1213]
Elsewhere he is protected by the maintenance of the provincial
Assemblies, and through the incorporation of the nobility with the
soil: in Languedoc and in Brittany the commoners alone paid the
taille[1214]--Everywhere else his quality preserved him from it, him,
his chateau and the chateau's dependencies; the taille reaches him only
through his farmers. And better s