al fashion, the
domestic fabrication of spirits. This is an old and prosperous industry
in Normandy. It is carried on, according to an official estimate made in
1888, by above five hundred thousand farmers in France; and in Normandy
particularly, a land of apples and pears, it is a great resource of the
farmers. They make here a liquor called Calvados, which when it attains
a certain age is much more drinkable and much less unwholesome than most
of the casual cognac of our times. After three years this very unpopular
law was repealed in 1875, mainly through the efforts of M. Bocher. It
had plagued the farmers more than it benefited the Treasury.

The _bouilleurs de cru_, as these domestic distillers are called, had
made during the three years 1869-72, 1,199,000 hectolitres of spirits
which paid excise duties. During the three years 1872-75 under the
Wilson law the production fell to about 165,000 hectolitres a year. In
the first year, 1875-76, after the repeal of the law it rose to 301,000
hectolitres.

The sale of crosses of the Legion, official contracts and other
operations not consistent with that virtue on which alone Montesquieu
tells us a republic can safely repose, made an end of M. Wilson and of
his father-in-law. But the enormous Republican deficit kept on
increasing, and in 1888, under the presidency of M. Carnot, the
Republicans revived a project formed by M. Carnot when Minister of
Finance, in 1886, for imposing upon the _bouilleurs de cru_ anew the
severe and inquisitorial taxation of 1872. Under the law introduced to
effect this, January 12, 1888, the whole of the buildings in which any
part of the processes of this production may be carried on must be open
to the tax-officers _at all hours of the day or night_. As many of the
_bouilleurs de cru_ are small farmers who use part of their houses for
some of these processes, it may be imagined how bitterly they oppose
such a law. They have no more love for tax-gatherers than the people of
other countries have; but the English maxim that every man's house is
his castle is a distinctly Norman maxim, and this menace offered to the
sanctity and privacy of the domicile has profoundly exasperated the
Norman populations. It is of a piece, they think, with the arbitrary
school system and with the elaborate contrivances devised to deprive the
communes of the right finally to certify and give effect to the returns
of their own elections. Above all, it is an interferen