“The tax-gatherers do not, indeed, come to you and demand money of you; but there are few articles which you use, in the purchase of which you do not pay a tax. On your shoes, salt, beer, malt, hops, tea, sugar, candles, soap, paper, coffee, spirits, glass of your windows, bricks and tiles, tobacco. On all these, and many other articles, you pay a tax, and even on your loaf you pay a tax, because everything is taxed from which the loaf proceeds. In several cases the tax amounts to more than one-half of what you pay for the article itself; these taxes go, in part, to support sinecure placemen and pensioners; and the ruffians of the hired press call you the Scum of Society, and deny that you have any right to show your faces at any public meeting to petition for a Reform, or for the removal of any abuse whatever! Mr. Preston, whom I quoted before, and who is a member of parliament, and has a large estate, says upon this subject, ‘Every family, even of the poorest labourer, consisting of five persons, may be considered as paying in indirect taxes, at least ten pounds a year, or more than half his wages at seven shillings a week!’ And yet the insolent hirelings call you the _mob_, the _rabble_, the _scum_, the _swinish multitude_, and say that your voice is nothing; that you have no business at public meetings; and that you are, and ought to be, considered as nothing in the body politic! Shall we never see the day when these men will change their tone? Will they never cease to look upon you as brutes? I trust they will change their tone, and that the day of the change is _at no great distance_! * * * * * “With what feelings must you look upon the condition of your country, where the increase of the people is now looked upon as a curse! Thus, however, has it always been, in all countries, where taxes have produced excessive misery. Our countryman, Mr. Gibbon, in his history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, has the following passage:-- “‘The horrid practice of murdering their new-born infants was become every day more frequent in the provinces. It was the effect of _distress_, and the distress was principally occasioned by the intolerable burden of taxes, and by the vexations as well as cruel prosecutions of the officers of the Revenue against their insolvent debtors. The less opulent or less industrious part of mankind, instead of rejoicing at an increase of family, deemed it an act of paternal tenderness to release the children from the impending miseries of a life which they themselves were unable to support.’