"In this way, my expenses continued to increase; all my resources are now exhausted, and the saddest part of it all is that the good cities and communes of Flanders and especially the country folk are at the very end of their sacrifices. With grief I see many of my subjects unable to pay their taxes, and obliged to emigrate. Nevertheless, my receipts are so scanty that I have little advantage from them. Nor do I reap more from my hereditary lands, for all are equally impoverished. "A way must be found to ease the poor people, and at the same time to protect Flanders from insult, Flanders for whose sake I would risk my own person, although to arrive at this end, important measures have become imperative." After this affectionate preamble, Philip finally states that, in order to raise the requisite revenues, no method seemed to him so good and so simple as a tax on salt, three sous on every measure for a term of twelve years. He promised to dispense with all other subsidies and to make his son swear to demand nothing further as long as the _gabelle_ was imposed. "Know [he added in conclusion] that even if you consent to it I will renounce it if others prove of a different opinion, for I do not desire that the communes of Flanders be more heavily weighted than any other portion of my territory." The duke might have spared his trouble and his elaborate condescension. The answer to his conciliatory request was a flat refusal to consider the matter at all. Salt was a vital necessity to Flemish fisheries, and its cost could not be increased to the least degree without serious inconvenience. The Flemings were wroth at his imitating the worst custom of his French kinsmen. Philip departed from Ghent in great dudgeon. After a time he was persuaded that the indisposition of the town to meet his reasonable wishes was not due to the citizens at large, but to the machinations of a few unruly agitators among the magistrates. In 1449, therefore, he took a high-handed course of trying to direct the issue of the regular municipal elections, so as to ensure the choice of magistrates on whose obedience he could rely. The appearance of Burgundian troops in Ghent, before the election of mid-August, aroused the wrath of the community, who thought that their most cherished franchises were in jeopardy.