The collection was easy, because, being united in bodies, they watched each other, and prevented fraud. Being paid in kind, the Sultan had magazines in the great provincial towns to store these revenues, and sent to market the residue, after maintaining his palaces, soldiers, and dependants; consequently, there were no currency troubles. The present Sultan, by making the merchants his debtors, has converted the guardians of common rights into his satellites; and finding his account in remitting the payment of the customs, and allowing himself to be defrauded of what we should esteem a legitimate revenue, he has so far succeeded. Customs are looked upon as the affairs of the merchants, and the merchants are all foreigners and infidels. Taxes are then arbitrarily imposed on trade--monopolies are granted, and the whole production of the country is paralysed and subjected to a foreign influence, which they cannot indeed unravel, but against which there is a deep and universal sense of reprobation. It is not from Europe that they will learn the secret of the ancient well-being of so many states and empires, which were great without parliamentary votes and political economists. FOOTNOTES: [226] At the time of the treaty of Kaniordgi the Moorish Sultan, however, addressed Louis XIV. on the danger to Europe of so powerful a combination directed against Turkey. [227] In the terrors and alarms which followed the treaty of July 1840, one of his ministers thus describes the scene at the council: “Nous étions dix, et nous n’en savons pas plus l’un que l’autre, et il y avoit le roi, qui n’en savoit pas plus que nous, et _qui sang-lottait_.” (The above was written while Louis Philippe was still held to be the “ablest man in France,” and the “wiliest politician in Europe.”) [228] Those who pay ready money have 25 per cent. discount allowed them. This is not the form, but the substance of the tariff regulations. CHAPTER VI. THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE IN RABAT.