h without overburdening
the poor. To give another example. Suppose a share assessed to each
person of one or two francs for the consumption of salt and you obtain
ten or a dozen millions; the modern "gabelle" disappears, the poor
breathe freer, agriculture is relieved, the State receives as much,
and no tax-payer complains. All persons, whether they belong to the
industrial classes or to the capitalists, will see at once the benefits
of a tax so assessed when they discover how commerce increases, and life
is ameliorated in the country districts. In short, the State will see
from year to year the number of her well-to-do tax-payers increasing. By
doing away with the machinery of indirect taxation, which is very costly
(a State, as it were, within a State), both the public finances and the
individual tax-payer are greatly benefited, not to speak of the saving
in costs of collecting.

The whole subject is indeed less a question of finance than a question
of government. The State should possess nothing of its own, neither
forests, nor mines, nor public works. That it should be the owner of
domains was, in Rabourdin's opinion, an administrative contradiction.
The State cannot turn its possessions to profit and it deprives itself
of taxes; it thus loses two forms of production. As to the manufactories
of the government, they are just as unreasonable in the sphere of
industry. The State obtains products at a higher cost than those
of commerce, produces them more slowly, and loses its tax upon the
industry, the maintenance of which it, in turn, reduces. Can it be
thought a proper method of governing a country to manufacture instead
of promoting manufactures? to possess property instead of creating
more possessions and more diverse ones? In Rabourdin's system the State
exacted no money security; he allowed only mortgage securities; and for
this reason: Either the State holds the security in specie, and that
embarrasses business and the movement of money; or it invests it at
a higher rate than the State itself pays, and that is a contemptible
robbery; or else it loses on the transaction, and that is folly;
moreover, if it is obliged at any time to dispose of a mass of these
securities it gives rises in certain cases to terrible bankruptcy.

The territorial tax did not entirely disappear in Rabourdin's plan,--he
kept a minute portion of it as a point of departure in case of war;
but the productions of the soil were freed, and ind