ther
sufficiently indicates the difference in their condition. The contrast
is still greater when you return from France." In England nobody was
too poor to wear leather shoes; in Scotland even the lowest orders of
men wore them, though the same orders of women still went about
barefooted. But "in France they are necessaries neither to men nor to
women; the lowest rank of both sexes appearing there publicly,
without any discredit, sometimes in wooden shoes and sometimes
barefooted."[192] Another little circumstance struck him as a proof
that the classes immediately above the rank of labourer were worse off
in France than they were here. The taste for dressing yew-trees into
the shape of pyramids and obelisks by "that very clumsy instrument of
sculpture" the gardener's shears had gone out of fashion in this
country, merely because it got too common, and was discarded by the
rich and vain. The multitude of persons able to indulge the taste was
sufficiently great to drive the custom out of fashion. In France, on
the other hand, he found this custom still in good repute,
"notwithstanding," he adds, "that inconstancy of fashion with which we
sometimes reproach the natives of that country." The reason was that
the number of people in that country able to indulge this taste was
too few to deprive the custom of the requisite degree of rarity. "In
France the condition of the inferior ranks of people is seldom so
happy as it frequently is in England, and you will there seldom find
even pyramids and obelisks of yew in the garden of a tallow-chandler.
Such ornaments, not having in that country been degraded by their
vulgarity, have not yet been excluded from the gardens of princes and
great lords."[193]

He discusses one great cause of the poorer condition of the French
than of the English people. It was generally acknowledged, he says,
that "the people of France was much more oppressed by taxation than
the people of Great Britain"; and the oppression he found, by personal
investigation, to be all due to bad taxes and bad methods of
collecting them. The sum that reached the public treasury represented
a much smaller burden per head of population than it did in this
country. Smith calculated the public revenue of Great Britain to
represent an assessment of about 25s. a head of population, and in
1765 and 1766, the years he was in France, according to the best,
though, he admits, imperfect, accounts he could get of the matter, the