Misgovernment, it is true, had done its worst in pre-revolutionary France, but it could not ruin fertile territory and a thrifty population. At that time the cities of Bordeaux, Lyons, and Marseilles surpassed in wealth and in the number of their inhabitants Copenhagen, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, and Berlin. Several of the provincial parliaments offered as fair a field for legal talent as the Courts of Dublin and Edinburgh. After the landed nobility, the Church, the King, his ministers, intendants, and a host of minor officials had taken their rents and revenues and stipends, fortunes were still left for rapacious financiers and rascally farmers-general. Smith saw all this and explained it with his usual lucidity. But he never mistook wealth for welfare. He applied his favourite test of the condition of the labouring poor. Though France was a much richer country, with a better soil and climate than Scotland, and “better stocked with all those things which it requires a long time to raise up and accumulate, such as great towns and convenient and well-built houses, both in town and country,” yet the poor were worse off. In England the common people all [_sic_] wore leather shoes, in Scotland the men only; in France both men and women went about sometimes in wooden shoes and sometimes barefooted. He finds the reason for these things in unfair and ill-judged taxation, and he devotes many pages to a severe scrutiny of the French system. Considering that France had some twenty-four millions of people, thrice the number of Great Britain, that it was naturally richer and had been “much longer in a state of improvement and cultivation,” it might have been expected that the French Government could have raised a revenue of thirty millions with as little inconvenience as a revenue of ten millions was raised in Great Britain. In 1765 and 1766 the revenue actually paid into the French Treasury did not amount to fifteen millions sterling. Yet the taxes were so devised and collected that the French people, it was generally acknowledged, were much more oppressed by taxes than the people of Great Britain. “France, however, is certainly the great Empire in Europe which, after that of Great Britain, enjoys the mildest and most indulgent government!” Smith had not only diagnosed the disease; his French studies and his friendship with enlightened men like Turgot, Quesnai, and Morellet had enabled him to propose remedies. “The finances of France,” he observes in the second chapter of his fifth book, “seem in their present state to admit of three very obvious reformations.” First, he would abolish the _taille_ and the capitation, balancing the loss by increasing the number of _vingtièmes_ or land-tax. Second, “by rendering the _gabelle_, the _aides_, the _traites_, the taxes upon tobacco, and all the different customs and excises, uniform in all the different parts of the kingdom, those taxes might be levied at much less expense, and the interior