o more privileges arising from birth, condition,
profession or residence, the Treasury, with fewer duties, collected or
gained as much as before the Revolution: In 1809 and 1810, 20 millions
on tobacco, 54 millions on salt, 100 millions on liquors, and then, as
the taxpayer became richer and spent more, still larger and larger
sums: in 1884, 305 millions on tobacco: in 1885, 429 millions on
liquors,[3248] without counting another 100 millions again raised on
liquors through town octrois.--And lastly, the exchequer, with extreme
prudence, keeps out of sight and succeeds in almost saving the taxpayer
from contact with, or the presence of, its agents. There is an end to
a domestic inquisition. The excise man no longer pounces in on the
housewife to taste the pickle, to find out whether the ham has been
cured with bogus salt, to certify that all the dutiable salt has been
used in "the pot and the salt-cellar." The wine-inspector no longer
comes suddenly on the wine-grower, or even on the consumer, to gauge his
casks, to demand an account of what he drinks, to make an affidavit in
case of deficit or over-consumption, to impose a fine should a bottle
have been given to a sick person or to a poor one. The 50,000 customs
officers or clerks of the ferme, the 23,000 soldiers without a uniform
who, posted in the interior along a line of 1200 leagues, guarded the
heavily taxed salt districts against the provinces which were less
taxed, redeemed or free, the innumerable employees at the barriers,
forming a confused and complicated band around each province, town,
district or canton, levying on twenty or thirty different sorts of
merchandise forty-five principal duties, general, provincial, or
municipal, and nearly sixteen hundred tolls, in short, the entire body
of officials of the old system of indirect taxation has almost wholly
disappeared. Save at the entrance of towns, and for the octroi the eye
no longer encounters an official clerk. The carters who, from Roussillon
or Languedoc, transport a cask of wine to Paris, are no longer subject
to his levies, humiliations and moods in twenty different places, nor
to ascribe to him the dozen or fifteen days' useless extension of their
trip due to his predecessor, and during which they had to wait in his
office until he wrote a receipt or a permit. There is scarcely any one
now but the inn-keeper who sees his green uniform on his premises. After
the abolition of the house-inventory, nearly