mer; to-morrow it
is the other way. The one tears down what the other painfully builds up.
The confusion is ever greater; the discontent ever more lasting; the
causes of friction multiply and consume in a few months more energies
than years did formerly. Along with all that, material sacrifices,
called for by manifold taxes, swell beyond all measure.

In the midst of all this, our sapient statesmen are lulling themselves
in wondrous illusions. With an eye to sparing property and the rich,
forms of taxation are selected that smite the needy classes heaviest,
and they are decreed with the belief that, seeing a large portion of the
masses have not yet discovered their real nature, neither will they be
felt. This is an error. The masses to-day understand fully the nature of
indirect imports and taxes upon the necessaries of life. Their growing
political education and perspicuity disclose to them the gross injustice
of the same; and they are all the more sensitive to these burdens by
reason of the wretchedness of their economic conditions, especially
where families are large. The rise of prices in the necessaries of
life--due to indirect imposts, or to causes that bring on similar
results, such as the premiums on brandy and sugar that, to the amount of
dozens of millions, a part of the ruling class pockets yearly at the
expense of the poor of the kingdom, and that it seeks to raise still
higher--are realized to be a gross injustice, a heavy burden, measures
that stand in odd contradiction with the nature of the so-called
Christian State, the State of Social Reform. These measures extinguish
the last spark of faith in the sense of justice of the ruling classes,
to a degree that is serious to these. It changes nothing in the final
effect of these measures that the draining is done in pennies. The
increase in the expenditure is there, and is finally sensible to the
feeling and the sight of all. Hundreds upon hundreds of millions cannot
be squeezed out of practically empty pockets, without the owners of the
pockets becoming aware of the lifting. The strong pressure of direct
taxation, directs the dissatisfaction among the poor against the State;
the still stronger indirect taxation, _directs the discontent against
society also, the evil being felt to be of a social as well as political
character_. In that there is progress. Him whom the gods would destroy,
they first make blind.

In the endeavor to do justice to the most oppose