ives more. This reform, which
may seem immense, rests on very simple machinery. Rabourdin regarded
the tax on personal property as the most trustworthy representative of
general consumption. Individual fortunes are usually revealed in France
by rentals, by the number of servants, horses, carriages, and luxuries,
the costs of which are all to the interest of the public treasury.
Houses and what they contain vary comparatively but little, and are not
liable to disappear. After pointing out the means of making a tax-list
on personal property which should be more impartial than the existing
list, Rabourdin assessed the sums to be brought into the treasury by
indirect taxation as so much per cent on each individual share. A tax
is a levy of money on things or persons under disguises that are more or
less specious. These disguises, excellent when the object is to extort
money, become ridiculous in the present day, when the class on which the
taxes weigh the heaviest knows why the State imposes them and by what
machinery they are given back. In fact the budget is not a strong-box to
hold what is put into it, but a watering-pot; the more it takes in and
the more it pours out the better for the prosperity of the country.
Therefore, supposing there are six millions of tax-payers in easy
circumstances (Rabourdin proved their existence, including the rich) is
it not better to make them pay a duty on the consumption of wine, which
would not be more offensive than that on doors and windows and would
return a hundred millions, rather than harass them by taxing the thing
itself. By this system of taxation, each individual tax-payer pays less
in reality, while the State receives more, and consumers profit by a
vast reduction in the price of things which the State releases from its
perpetual and harassing interference. Rabourdin's scheme retained a tax
on the cultivation of vineyards, so as to protect that industry from the
too great abundance of its own products. Then, to reach the consumption
of the poorer tax-payers, the licences of retail dealers were taxed
according to the population of the neighborhoods in which they lived.

In this way, the State would receive without cost or vexatious
hindrances an enormous revenue under three forms; namely, a duty on
wine, on the cultivation of vineyards, and on licenses, where now
an irritating array of taxes existed as a burden on itself and its
officials. Taxation was thus imposed upon the ric