han those of the taxpayers; consequently, using its collectors,
it takes the money out of their pockets; all, indiscriminately,
willingly or not, pay supplementary taxes for supplementary services,
whether this service benefits them or is repugnant to them. If I am a
Protestant in a Catholic State, or a Catholic in a Protestant State, I
pay for religion which seems wrong to me and for a Church which seems
to me mischievous. If I am a skeptic, a free-thinker, indifferent or
hostile to positive religions in France, I pay to-day for the support of
four cults which I regard as useless or pernicious. If I am a provincial
or a peasant, I pay for maintaining an "Opera" which I never attend and
for a "Sevres" and "Gobelins" of which I never see a vase or a piece of
tapestry.--In times of tranquility the extortion is covered up, but
in troubled times it is nakedly apparent. Under the revolutionary
government, bands of collectors armed with pikes made raids on villages
as in conquered countries;[2204] the farmer, collared and kept down by
blows from the butt end of a musket, sees his grain taken from his barn
and his cattle from their stable; "all scampered off on the road to
the town;" while around Paris, within a radius of forty leagues, the
departments fasted in order that the capital might be fed. With gentler
formalities, under a regular government, a similar extortion occurs when
the State, employing a respectable collector in uniform, takes from our
purse a crown too much for an office outside of its competency. If,
as with the Jacobin State, it claims all offices, it empties the purse
entirely; instituted for the conservation of property, it confiscates
the whole of it.--Thus, with property, as with persons, when the state
proposes to itself another purpose than the preservation of these, not
only does it overstep its mandate but it acts contrary to its mandate.

IV. Abuse of State powers.

It badly fills the office of the bodies it supplant.--Cases
in which it usurps their powers and refuses to be their
substitute.--Cases in which it violates or profits by their
mechanism.--In all cases it is bad or mediocre substitute.
--Reasons derived from its structure compared with that of
other bodies.

Let us consider the other series of abuses, and the way in which the
State performs the service of the corporate bodies it supplants.

In the first place there is a chance that, sooner or later