ng machine, clumsy and badly put together, of which
the action is about as mischievous as it is serviceable. The worst
feature is that, with its creaking gear, the taxable, those employed
as its final instruments, are equally shorn and flayed. Each parish
contains two, three, five, or seven individuals who, under the title of
collectors, and under the authority of the election tribunal, apportion
and assess the taxes. "No duty is more onerous;"[5216] everybody,
through patronage or favor, tries to get rid of it. The communities are
constantly pleading against the refractory, and, that nobody may escape
under the pretext of ignorance, the table of future collectors is made
up for ten and fifteen years in advance. In parishes of the second class
these consist of "small proprietors, each of whom becomes a collector
about every six years." In many of the villages the artisans,
day-laborers, and metayer-farmers perform the service, although
requiring all their time to earn their own living. In Auvergne, where
the able-bodied men expatriate themselves in winter to find work,
the women are taken;[5217] in the election-district of Saint-Flour, a
certain village has four collectors in petticoats.--They are responsible
for all claims entrusted to them, their property, their furniture and
their persons; and, up to the time of Turgot, each is bound for the
others. We can judge of their risks and sufferings. In 1785,[5218] in
one single district in Champagne, eighty-five are imprisoned and two
hundred of them are on the road every year. "The collector, says the
provincial assembly of Berry,[5219] usually passes one-half of the day
for two years running from door to door to see delinquent tax-payers."
"This service," writes Turgot,[5220] "is the despair and almost
always the ruin of those obliged to perform it; all families in easy
circumstances in a village are thus successively reduced to want." In
short, there is no collector who is not forced to act and who has not
each year "eight or ten writs" served on him[5221]. Sometimes he is
imprisoned at the expense of the parish. Sometimes proceedings are
instituted against him and the tax-contributors by the installation of
"'blue men' and seizures, seizures under arrest, seizures in execution
and sales of furniture." "In the single district of Villefranche," says
the provincial Assembly of Haute-Guyenne, "a hundred and six warrant
officers and other agents of the bailiff are counted alwa