PRINCIPLES OF TAXATION, 39 



It is interesting also to note in this connection tLat against no 

 one class, when the revolutionary element became ascendant in 

 France, was popular hatred more intense than to the farmers- 

 general, to whom the collection of taxes in the different provinces 

 of the kingdom was farmed out or contracted. The extravagant 

 expenditure which, as a rule, characterized their living, was re- ; 

 garded by the masses as all-sufficient evidence of the enormous { 

 profits unjustly accruing to them from these contracts ; and the ' 

 power continually exercised by their agents to make domiciliary 

 visits, seize goods, inflict fines, and take other measures of an arbi- l 

 trary, obnoxious character to enforce compliance with extortions, 

 all contributed to make them objects of execration by nearly the 

 entire people. And this animosity under the revolutionary gov- 

 ernment speedily manifested itself, by sending thirty-two out of 

 the whole number — sixty — of these high officials to the guillotine ; 

 among whom were undoubtedly some honest and conscientious 

 financiers and otherwise distinguished men, such as Lavoisier, 

 the father of modern chemistry. 



One of the great results of the French Revolution, which ought 

 to be duly weighed in reckoning up the good and evil of that mighty 

 popular convulsion, is that it swept away the feudal land laws of 

 old France and made landowners of several millions of men who 

 were formerly serfs. Fully one half of the land of France at the 

 present time is owned by small farmers or peasants ; and in their j / 

 hands has been demonstrated afresh what Arthur Young called ' ^ 

 the magic power of property to turn sand to gold. Regions 

 which he visited in 1788, and found barren and deserted, a hun- | 

 dred years later were clothed with vines and gardens under the j 

 tillage of peasant proprietors. 



From the foregoing consideration of France in the last cen- 

 tury, experiencing through the abuse of taxation the most awful 

 revolution in history, let us turn to a country of our own time 

 and continent, and observe methods of taxation yet surviving the 

 vigor and barbarism of the mediseval period. 



Taxation in Mexico. — Until recently, and to a great extent 

 at present, the system of taxation operative in Mexico, the ori- 

 gin or evolution of which may in no small part be attributed 

 to a sparseness of population, lack of accumulated wealth or capi- 

 tal, limited wants, and low civilization of the masses, is especiallj'' 

 worthy of notice, and most instructive from the circumstance that 

 nothing like it exists in any other country. 



took off the taxes from the man of fashion, and laid them with accumulated weight on the 

 poor who were so unfortunate as to be his neighbors ? Who has dwelt sufficiently on ex- 

 plaining all the ramifications of despotism, regal, aristocratical, and ecclesiastical, pervading 

 the whole mass of the people, reaching like a circulating fluid the most distant capillary 

 tubes of poverty and wretchedness?" — Young^s Travels in France. 



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