AND RELIGION 



glass. It is the same as to almost every thing that comes from 

 England. You are compelled to pay the Boroughmongers a 

 heavy tax on your candles and soap. You dare not make candles 

 and soap, though you have the fat and the ashes in abundance. 

 If you attempt to do this, you are taken up and imprisoned ; 

 and, if you resist, soldiers are brought to shoot you. This is 

 freedom, is it ? Now, we, here, make our own candles and soap. 

 Farmers sometimes sell soap and candles ; but they never buy 

 any. A labouring man, or a mechanic, buys a sheep now and 

 then. Three or four days work will buy a labourer a sheep to 

 weigh sixty pounds, with seven or eight pounds of loose fat. 

 The meat keeps very well, in winter, for a long time. The wool 

 makes stockings. And the loose fat is made into candles and 

 soap. The year before I left Hampshire, a poor woman at Holly 

 Hill had dipped some rushes in grease to use instead of candles. 

 An Exciseman found it out ; went and ransacked her house ; 

 and told her, that, if the rushes had had another dip, they would 

 have been candles, and she must have gone to jail ! Why, my 

 friends, if such a thing were told here, nobody would believe it. 

 The Americans could not bring their minds to believe, that 

 Englishmen would submit to such atrocious, such degrading 

 tyranny. 



427. I have had living with me an Englishman, who smokes 

 tobacco ; and he tells me, that he can buy as much tobacco here 

 for three cents : that is, about three English half-pence, as he could 

 buy in England for three shillings. The leather has no tax on it 

 here ; so that, though the shoe-maker is paid a high price for his 

 labour, the labouring man gets his shoes very cheap. In short, 

 there is no excise here ; no property tax : no assessed taxes. We 

 have no such men here as Chiddel and Billy Toveiy to come and 

 take our money from us. No window peepers. No spies to 

 keep a look out as to our carriages and horses and dogs. Our 

 dogs that came from Botley now run about free from the spying 

 of tax-gatherers. We may wear hair-powder if we like without 

 paying for it, and a boy in our houses may whet our knives without 

 our paying two pounds a year for it. 



428. But, then, we have not the honour of being covered over 

 with the dust, kicked up by the horses and raised by the carriage- 

 wheels of such men as Old GEORGE ROSE and OLD GARNIER, each 

 of whom has pocketted more than three hundred thousand pounds 

 of the public, that is to say, the people s, money. There are no 

 such men here. Those who receive public money here, do 

 something for it. They earn it. They are no richer than other 

 people. The Judges rTeTfe^sis^plain-dressed men. They go about 

 with no sort of parade. They are dressed, on the Bench, like other 

 men. The lawyers the same. Here are no black gowns and 

 scarlet gowns and big foolish-looking wigs. Yet, in the whole 

 world, there is not so well-behaved, so orderly, so steady a people ; 

 a people so obedient to the law. But, it is the law only that they will 



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