In our own favoured realms millers have their troubles, no doubt, as well as other folk, but at anyrate they are not tormented with a _grist-tax_; and indeed in these enlightened days we should have thought that such an impost was unknown in all countries claiming to have attained a high degree of civilisation. Mr Edward Herries, C.B., late Her Majesty's Secretary of Legation at Rome, in the course of his elaborate Report on the Financial System of Italy, has, however, shewn us our mistake; and in tracing the history and present position of the tax, he furnishes us with some curious particulars respecting it. As our readers will doubtless be struck with the anomaly of a powerful government having recourse nowadays to indirect taxation to augment its revenue, it may be well at the outset to cite a brief paragraph from Mr Herries' Report, in order to shew how it happened that the grist-tax came to be reimposed upon the people of Italy. Towards the close of the year 1865, he writes, M. Sella, then Minister of Finance, having to meet a deficit estimated for 1866 at upwards of two hundred and sixty-one million lire (say ten million four hundred and fifty thousand pounds), and being compelled, he said, to have recourse to indirect taxation for a large increase of revenue, urged upon the Chamber of Deputies the revival of the grist-tax, which he considered as fulfilling more completely than any other new impost that could be found the essential conditions of great productiveness, wide diffusion, and equal pressure on all parts of the kingdom. The impost seems to have made its first appearance in Sicily, where it was a source of revenue during the Norman period, and there, no one was allowed to carry corn to be ground without first obtaining, after much delay, a permit, for which he had to pay the duty chargeable on the grinding of the corn. The attestation of the officer in charge of the mill was requisite for the removal of the flour, for which a certain route was prescribed, and which was always to be accompanied by the permit. The miller was not even allowed to keep the key of his own mill, and was prohibited from grinding corn between sunset and sunrise. The wants of the population, however, sometimes made it necessary to relax this rule; and in such cases the miller (whose family was never to remain in the mill with him) was securely locked and barred in for the night, without any means of communicating with the outer world, whatever might happen. This treatment, however, was at length seen to be cruel; and permission was granted to any miller exposed to imminent peril from fire, flood, or other calamity, to free himself from nocturnal incarceration by breaking (if he could) through the door, window, or roof. It does not seem to have been foreseen, Mr Herries aptly remarks, that such a gracious concession might be rendered nugatory by the strength of the barriers or the feebleness of the miller!