[Sidenote: "Too much taxes."] "Too much taxes:" those three little words furnish us with a clue wherewith to understand and explain a great deal of history. A great many sieges of towns, so horrid to have endured though so picturesque to read about, hundreds of weary marches and deadly battles, thousands of romantic plots that have led their inventors to the scaffold, have owed their origin to questions of taxation. The issue between the ducal commander and the warlike tradesman has been tried over and over again in every country and in every age, and not always has the oppressor been so speedily thwarted and got rid of. The questions as to how much the taxes shall be, and who is to decide how much they shall be, are always and in every stage of society questions of most fundamental importance. And ever since men began to make history, a very large part of what they have done, in the way of making history, has been the attempt to settle these questions, whether by discussion or by blows, whether in council chambers or on the battlefield. The French Revolution of 1789, the most terrible political convulsion of modern times, was caused chiefly by "too much taxes," and by the fact that the people who paid the taxes were not the people who decided what the taxes were to be. Our own Revolution, which made the United States a nation independent of Great Britain, was brought on by the disputed question as to who was to decide what taxes American citizens must pay. [Sidenote: What is taxation?] What, then, are taxes? The question is one which is apt to come up, sooner or later, to puzzle children. They find no difficulty in understanding the butcher's bill for so many pounds of meat, or the tailor's bill for so many suits of clothes, where the value received is something that can be seen and handled. But the tax bill, though it comes as inevitably as the autumnal frosts, bears no such obvious relation to the incidents of domestic life; it is not quite so clear what the money goes for; and hence it is apt to be paid by the head of the household with more or less grumbling, while for the younger members of the family it requires some explanation. It only needs to be pointed out, however, that in every town some things are done for the benefit of all the inhabitants of the town, things which concern one person just as much as another. Thus roads are made and kept in repair, school-houses are built and salaries paid to school-teachers, there are constables who take criminals to jail, there are engines for putting out fires, there are public libraries, town cemeteries, and poor-houses. Money raised for these purposes, which are supposed to concern all the inhabitants, is supposed to be paid by all the inhabitants, each one furnishing his share; and the share which each one pays is his town tax.