his way the
privileged classes escape the taille, they and their property, including
their farms.--Now, the taille, ever augmenting, is that which provides,
through its special delegations, such a vast number of new offices. A
man of the Third-Estate has merely to run through the history of its
periodical increase to see how it alone, or almost alone, paid and is
paying[5245] for the construction of bridges, roads, canals and courts
of justice, for the purchase of offices, for the establishment and
support of houses of refuge, insane asylums, nurseries, post-houses for
horses, fencing and riding schools, for paving and sweeping Paris, for
salaries of lieutenants-general, governors, and provincial commanders,
for the fees of bailiffs, seneschals and vice-bailiffs, for the salaries
of financial and election officials and of commissioners dispatched to
the provinces, for those of the police of the watch and I know not how
many other purposes.--In the provinces which hold assemblies, where the
taille would seem to be more justly apportioned, the like inequality
is found. In Burgundy[5246] the expenses of the police, of public
festivities, of keeping horses, all sums appropriated to the courses
of lectures on chemistry, botany, anatomy and parturition, to the
encouragement of the arts, to subscriptions to the chancellorship, to
franking letters, to presents given to the chiefs and subalterns of
commands, to salaries of officials of the provincial assemblies, to the
ministerial secretaryship, to expenses of levying taxes and even alms,
in short, 1,800,000 livres are spent in the public service at the charge
of the Third-Estate, the two higher orders not paying a cent.

In the second place, with respect to the poll-tax, originally
distributed among twenty-two classes and intended to bear equally on
all according to fortunes, we know that, from the first, the clergy buy
themselves off; and, as to the nobles, they manage so well as to have
their tax reduced proportionately with its increase at the expense of
the Third-Estate. A count or a marquis, an intendant or a master of
requests, with 40,000 livres income, who, according to the tariff of
1695,[5247] should pay from 1,700 to 2,500 livres, pays only 400 livres,
while a bourgeois with 6,000 livres income, and who, according to
the same tariff; should pay 70 livres, pays 720. The poll-tax of the
privileged individual is thus diminished three-quarters or five-sixths,
while that