=281. Persistence of customs frontiers inside France.=—Far more serious than the frontier tariff were the customs duties _inside_ of France. The French kings had made their country by the political union of feudal fragments, and had never used their great power to abolish the evidences of former separation and to unify their territory for the purposes of commerce. We must distinguish three different sections of the country. The North, roughly speaking, was an area in which internal trade was free, _i.e._, in which the provinces were not separated by customs barriers. The South, on the other hand, was composed of provinces “reputed foreign” which had kept their tariffs, so that trade here was not free, and wares passing between this and other parts of France had to pay duty. Still a third section was the East, “provinces foreign in fact”; these provinces did not form part of France at all, commercially speaking, for they were outside the national customs frontier, enjoying free trade with other countries and paying duties when they sent wares to other parts of France. If the reader will recall the economic evils that resulted in the Middle Ages from the separation of districts he will readily appreciate how much France lost by carrying over a medieval system to modern times. It was impossible for a district to make the most of its resources by specializing in production. A producer did not have France for a market; a consumer did not have France for his source of supply; each was bound by provincial restrictions. =282. Persistence of local toll barriers.=—Still the picture is not complete. There were not only provincial tariffs inside of France but also local customs inside the provinces. Let us consider the case of a merchant of Paris who desired to export a package of cloth to England in the sixteenth century. He had to pay not only the national export duty, but also at _fifteen_ places on the way down the Seine he had to pay local customs; at Rouen he must pay provincial customs; and we must add to his list of expenses freight, pilotage, etc. Wine carried from Bercy (near the Swiss frontier) to Paris, in the next century, had to pay sixteen different dues on the way to market. In the sixteenth century there were over a hundred tolls or customs on the Loire; in the next century there were still twenty-eight on the stretch from Orleans to Nantes; and some persisted till the French Revolution. Conditions improved in the course of time, as the above figures suggest, but improvement was obstructed by the opposition of local interests and retarded by the delay of the law; and the Revolution was needed to wipe away these remnants of the Middle Ages with many others.