his seigneur's dues and his pastor's tithe. Statistics may sometimes be misleading, but an able statistician has calculated, upon evidence which it is difficult to deny, that, allowing for all these direct charges, the peasant in many parts of France paid away four-fifths of his income to the Treasury, the seigneur, and the Church, and out of every hundred francs he earned, retained little more than eighteen francs himself[4]. But the record of his troubles did not end there. The Gabelle, perhaps the most exasperating impost ever devised by an empty Exchequer, compelled all citizens over seven years of age to purchase yearly seven pounds of salt from the agents of the State. But this salt was reserved for cooking and eating alone, and if salt for any other purpose were needed, the agents of the State had the right to make its subjects purchase more. The whole system of indirect taxation was conceived in the same spirit as this monument of fiscal folly. The face of the country was covered by barriers and custom-houses, occupied by an army of revenue officers, who purchased from the Government the right of collecting the customs and excise. Twelve hundred leagues of artificial frontiers separated the various provinces of France, impeded trade, and played havoc with prices. The small vine-growers were almost ruined by the excise levied upon wine, which even in those days was conspicuous for its severity and for the inquisitorial practices of those who enforced it. Calonne declared that the salt tax alone produced every year nearly four thousand sentences, of imprisonment, flogging, exile and the galleys. Under such auspices smuggling multiplied, and the Government retorted by heavy punishments. Bodies of armed banditti were organised in disturbed districts, and carried on for years together a guerilla war against the forces of the Crown. Unemployed labourers and ruined peasants found a livelihood in swelling the ranks of disaffection, and in the absence of any poor-law administration, mendicancy and vagabondage rapidly increased.