“You are compelled to pay the borough-mongers a heavy tax on your _candles_ and _soap_. You dare not _make_ candles and soap, though you have the fat and the ashes in abundance. If you attempt to do this, you are taken up and imprisoned; and if you resist, soldiers are brought to shoot you. This is _freedom_, is it? Now we, here, make our own candles and soap. Farmers sometimes _sell_ soap and candles, but they never _buy_ any. A labouring man, or a mechanic, buys a sheep now and then. Three or four days’ work will buy a labourer a sheep to weigh sixty pounds, with seven or eight pounds of loose fat. The meat keeps very well, in winter, for a long time. The wool makes stockings, and the loose fat is made into candles and soap. The year before I left Hampshire, a poor woman at Holly Hill had dipped some rushes in grease to use instead of candles. An exciseman found it out, went and ransacked her house, and told her that, if the rushes had had _another dip_, they would have been _candles_, and she must have gone to gaol! Why, my friends, if such a thing were told here, nobody would believe it.… “I have had living with me an English labourer. He smokes tobacco, and he tells me that he can buy as much tobacco here for three cents, that is about three English half-pence, as he could buy in England for three shillings. The leather has no tax on it here; so that, though the shoemaker is paid a high price for his labour, the labouring man gets his shoes very cheap. In short, there is no excise here, no property tax, no assessed taxes. We have no such men as Chiddel and Billy Tovey to come and take our money from us; no window-peepers; no spies to keep a look out as to our carriages, and horses, and dogs.… We may wear hair-powder if we like, without paying for it, and a boy in our houses may whet our knives without our paying 2_l._ a year for it.” “I have talked to several farmers here about the tithes in England, and _they laugh_. They sometimes almost make me angry, for they seem, at last, not to believe what I say when I tell them that the English farmer gives, and is compelled to give, the parson a tenth part of his whole crop, and of his fruit, and milk, and eggs, and calves, and lambs, and pigs, and wool, and honey. They cannot believe this. They treat it as a sort of _romance_.… “To another of my neighbours … I was telling the story about the poor woman at Holly Hill, who had nearly dipped her rushes once too often. He is a very grave and religious man. He looked very seriously at me, and said that falsehood was falsehood, whether in jest or earnest.”