ums as a tax due for the
permission of going through their country. In the frequent bloody
contests which the adjustment of these fees produces, the Turks complain
of robbery, and the Arabs of invasion."[125]

Here we trace _taxation_ through all its shifting forms, accommodating
itself to the feelings of the different people; the same principle
regulated the alternate terms proposed by the buccaneers, when they
_asked_ what the weaker party was sure to _give_, or when they _levied_
what the others paid only as a common _toll_.

When Louis the Eleventh of France beheld his country exhausted by the
predatory wars of England, he bought a peace of our Edward the Fourth by
an annual sum of fifty thousand crowns, to be paid at London, and
likewise granted _pensions_ to the English ministers. Holinshed and all
our historians call this a yearly _tribute_; but Comines, the French
memoir-writer, with a national spirit, denies that these _gifts_ were
either _pensions_ or _tributes_. "Yet," says Bodin, a Frenchman also,
but affecting a more philosophical indifference, "it must be either the
one or the other; though I confess, that those who receive a pension to
obtain peace, commonly boast of it _as if it were a tribute_!"[126]
Such are the shades of our feelings in this history of taxation and
tribute. But there is another artifice of applying soft names to hard
things, by veiling a tyrannical act by a term which presents no
disagreeable idea to the imagination. When it was formerly thought
desirable, in the relaxation of morals which prevailed in Venice, to
institute the office of _censor_, three magistrates were elected bearing
this title; but it seemed so harsh and austere in that dissipated city,
that these reformers of manners were compelled to change their title;
when they were no longer called _censors_, but _I signori sopra il bon
vivere della citta_, all agreed on the propriety of the office under the
softened term. Father Joseph, the secret agent of Cardinal Richelieu,
was the inventor of _lettres de cachet_, disguising that instrument of
despotism by the amusing term of _a sealed letter_. Expatriation would
have been merciful compared with the result of that _billet-doux_, a
sealed letter from his majesty!

Burke reflects with profound truth--"Abstract liberty, like other mere
abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible
object; and every nation has formed to itself some favourite point,
which,