two millions of proprietors
and wine metayers are forever free of his visits;[3249] from now on, for
consumers, especially for the people, he seems absent and non existent.
In effect, he has been transferred one or two hundred leagues off, to
the salt-establishments in the interior and on the coasts, and on
the frontier. There only is the system at fault, nakedly exposing
its vice,--a war against exchanges, the proscription of international
commerce, prohibition pushed to extreme, the continental blockade,
an inquisition of 20,000 customs officials, the hostility of 100,000
defrauders, the brutal destruction of seized goods, an augmentation
in price of 100 % on cottons and 400% on sugar, a dearth of colonial
articles, privation to the consumer, the ruin of the manufacturer and
trader, and accumulated bankruptcies one after the other in 1811 in all
the large towns from Hamburg to Rome.[3250] This vice, however, belongs
to the militant policy and personal character of the master; the error
that taints the external side of his fiscal system does not reach
the internal side. After him, under pacific reigns, it is gradually
modified; prohibition gives way to protection and then changes from
excessive protection to limited protection. France remains, along with
secondary improvements and partial amendments, on the course marked out
by the Consulate and the Empire; this course, in all its main lines,
is clearly traced, straight, and yet adapted to all things, by the
plurality, establishment, distribution, rate of taxation and returns of
the various direct and indirect taxes, nearly in conformity with the
new principles of political economy, as well as in conformity with the
ancient maxims of distributive justice, carefully directed between the
two important interests that have to be cared for, that of the people
who pays and of the State which collects.

Consider, in effect, what both have gained.--In 1789, the State had
a revenue of only 475 millions; afterwards, during the Revolution,
it scarcely collected any of its revenues; it lived on the capital it
stole, like a genuine brigand, or on the debts it contracted, like a
dishonest and insolvent bankrupt. Under the Consulate and during the
first years of the Empire, its revenue amounts to 750 to 800 millions,
its subjects being no longer robbed of their capital, while it no longer
runs in debt.--In 1789, the ordinary taxpayer paid a direct tax to his
three former or late sov