The multitude of persons able to indulge the taste was sufficiently great to drive the custom out of fashion. In France, on the other hand, he found this custom still in good repute, "notwithstanding," he adds, "that inconstancy of fashion with which we sometimes reproach the natives of that country." The reason was that the number of people in that country able to indulge this taste was too few to deprive the custom of the requisite degree of rarity. "In France the condition of the inferior ranks of people is seldom so happy as it frequently is in England, and you will there seldom find even pyramids and obelisks of yew in the garden of a tallow-chandler. Such ornaments, not having in that country been degraded by their vulgarity, have not yet been excluded from the gardens of princes and great lords."[193] He discusses one great cause of the poorer condition of the French than of the English people. It was generally acknowledged, he says, that "the people of France was much more oppressed by taxation than the people of Great Britain"; and the oppression he found, by personal investigation, to be all due to bad taxes and bad methods of collecting them. The sum that reached the public treasury represented a much smaller burden per head of population than it did in this country. Smith calculated the public revenue of Great Britain to represent an assessment of about 25s. a head of population, and in 1765 and 1766, the years he was in France, according to the best, though, he admits, imperfect, accounts he could get of the matter, the whole sum passed into the French treasury would only represent an assessment of 12s. 6d. per head of the French population.[194] Taxation ought thus to be really lighter in France than in Great Britain, but it was made into a scourge by vicious modes of assessment and collection. Smith even suggested for France various moderate financial reforms, repealing some taxes, increasing others, making a third class uniform over the kingdom, and abolishing the farming system; but though these reforms would be sufficient to restore prosperity to a country with the resources of France, he had no hope of it being possible to carry them against the active opposition of individuals interested in maintaining things as they were. Smith was thus perfectly alive to the prevailing poverty and distress of the French population, to the oppression they suffered, to the extreme difficulty, the hopelessness even, of any improvement of their situation while the existing distribution of political forces continued, and was able to defeat all efforts at reform. Now from all this it was not very far to the idea of a political upheaval and a new distribution of political forces, and Smith saw tendencies abroad in that direction also. He told Professor Saint Fond in 1782 that the "Social Compact" would one day avenge Rousseau for all the persecutions he had suffered from the powers that were. FOOTNOTES: