The first and most dreaded of the indirect taxes was the Salt Tax (_gabelle_). As salt is necessary for all, it has from early days been considered by some governments a good article for a tax, no one being able to escape payment by going entirely without it. To make the revenue more secure, every householder in certain parts of France was obliged to buy seven pounds of salt a year at the warehouses of the Farm, for every member of his family more than seven years old. In spite of this, a certain economy in the use of the article became the habit of the French nation, and the traveler of the nineteenth century may bless the government of the Bourbons when for once in his life he finds himself in a country where the cooks do not habitually oversalt the soup. The unfortunate Frenchmen of the eighteenth century had to pay dear for this culinary lesson. But in this matter as in others they did not all pay alike. The whole product of the salt tax to the treasury was about sixty million livres, of which two thirds, or forty millions, was taken from provinces containing a little more than one third of the population of the kingdom. Necker, who much desired to equalize the impost, mentions six principal categories of provinces in regard to the salt tax; varying from those in which the sale was free, and the article worth from two to nine livres the hundred weight, to those where it was a monopoly of the Farm, and the salt cost the consumer about sixty-two livres. Salt being thus worth thirty times as much in one province as in another, it was possible for a successful smuggler to make a living by a very few trips. The opportunity was largely used; children were trained by their parents for the illicit traffic, but the penalties were very severe. In the galleys were many salt-smugglers; people were shut up on mere suspicion, and in the crowded prisons of that day were carried off by jail-fevers.[Footnote: Necker, _De l'Administration_, ii. 1. Ibid., _Compte rendu_, 82, and see the map of France divided according to the _gabelle_ in the same volume. Bailly, ii. 163. Clamageran, iii. 84 _n._, 296, 406. For the numerous officers and complicated system of the _gabelle_, see _Encyclopédie_, vii. 942 (_Grenier a sel_); _Quintal_=100 French pounds; but which of the numerous French pounds, I know not.] Of all known stimulants, tobacco is perhaps the most agreeable and the least injurious to the person who takes it; but no method of taking it has yet been devised which is not liable to be offensive to the delicate nerves of some bystander. It is probably on this account that a certain discredit has always attached to this most soothing herb, and that it seldom gets fair treatment in the matter of taxation. Over a large part of France, containing some twenty-two millions of inhabitants, tobacco had been subject to monopoly for a hundred years when Louis XVI. came to the throne,[Footnote: With an interval of two years, during which it was subject to a high duty.