“We saw disappear those distinctions of provinces, _French_, _conquered_, _foreign_, etc., each surrounded with a double row of custom-house officers and smugglers, from whose intestine war the prisons, the galleys, and the gibbet were recruited at the will of the stipendiaries of him who _farmed the revenue_, and those other distinctions of noble or common property; when the parks and gardens of the rich paid nothing, while the land and the person of the poor man were taxed in proportion to his industry; when the tax upon the peasant and upon his freehold recalled to nineteen-twentieths of the citizens that their degradation was not only territorial, but individual and personal. “By its destruction, that constitutional equality was consecrated which makes the general good the only foundation of distinctions acknowledged by law. The privileged class lost the right of distributing among themselves exclusive privileges, and of treating with contempt all other classes of their fellow-citizens. No Frenchman was now excluded from office because he might not come of noble blood; or degraded, if noble, by the exercise of a useful profession.... “What more is there to regret? Is it the scheme of taxation, regulated by the king at the will of a minister of finance, whom I myself have seen changed twelve times in fourteen years, and which taxation was distributed arbitrarily among the provinces, and even among the contributors?... “Is it the capitation tax, established in 1702, to achieve the peace, and never afterwards repealed? The two-twentieths diminished on the contributions of the powerful and made heavier on those of the poor; the land tax, of which the basis was in Auvergne, nine sous out of twenty, and amounting sometimes to fourteen, on _account of the vast increase of privileged persons created by traffic in places_? Finally, is it the odious duties on consumption, more odious than the_ droits réunis_ of Napoleon? Is it the criminal jurisprudence, when the accused could neither see his family, his friends, his country, nor the documents by which he was to be tried?... When the verdict, obscurely obtained, might be aggravated at the pleasure of the judges by torture? for the torture preparatory to the examination had been alone abolished....” The _New York American_, of April, 1824, relates the following: “Our La Fayette has, it seems, given fresh offence lately to the ultra-royalists, which the following translation will explain. He had been summoned as a witness on a trial; the crier being ordered to call over the witnesses, the following scene occurred:— “_Crier._ The Marquis de La Fayette. “_Mr. La Fayette._ I beg to observe to the court, that in the list of witnesses I am named by a title which, since the decree of the Constituent Assembly in 1791 (the decree abolishing orders of nobility), I have ceased to bear. “_President of the Tribunal._ Crier, call Mr. La Fayette.