the government to see that the tax was fairly levied, while it was to the direct interest of the officials to take care that it was unfairly levied, stands selfcondemned, but it was a system which was universal throughout France. By farming out the different branches of the revenue to harpies who fattened on the misery of the people, the government shirked the difficulty of having to deal with venal servants of its own, and reaped the benefit of a sure though diminished income at the price of abdicating one of the chief functions of government, and subjecting the innocent tax-payers to the worst form of governmental tyranny, a taxation both capricious and corrupt. When Sully turned his attention to the abuses of the system, it is said that the people were paying 200 millions of francs in taxes while the government received only 50 millions! [Sidenote: =The Gabelle.=] If the _taille_ was the most lucrative tax, the _Gabelle_ or salt tax was the most oppressive. Salt was a government monopoly farmed out to capitalists in the usual way, but the special grievance with regard to the tax did not lie in the fact that it was a monopoly, or that the quality of the government salt was bad, but in the assessment of the tax. The government laid down by decree the amount of salt which every Frenchman was supposed to require, or at any rate had to buy, and each household was assessed therefore at a sum representing the amount of salt legally consumable by the number of persons of whom it was composed. There is something ludicrous in the idea of a paternal government dictating to its children the amount of salt which is good for them, but there was little of a joke in it to the over-burdened French peasant, who was compelled to pay an extortionate sum for a far larger amount of an inferior commodity than he could possibly use or dispose of. The door was thus thrown open wide to corruption and to smuggling--those two ogres which ever prey upon a faulty fiscal system--but the abuse not only lasted until the Revolution but grew in intensity with increasing civilisation. In 1781, eight years before the Revolution broke out, it was calculated that it cost 18 million _livres_ a year to bring the treasury a revenue of 72 million _livres_ from the _gabelle_; in other words, that a fourth of the produce of the tax was spent in collecting it, while the yearly convictions for smuggling amounted to between three and four thousand. [Sidenote: =The Aides and Douanes.=]