ided
with the rents of public lands, with wharfage, with tolls from the
markets and the _halles_; and, above all, with the _octroi_, a tax that
prevails through France, upon every article of consumption brought into
the towns, and is collected at the barriers. The _octroi_, like
turnpike-tolls or the post-horse duty with us, is farmed; two-thirds are
received by the government, and the remaining one-third by the town. In
Rouen it produced the last year one million four hundred and fifty
thousand francs.--If, now, this sum appears to you comparatively greater
than that of our large cities in England, you must recollect that, with
us, towns are not liable to similar charges: our corporations support no
museums, no academies, no learned bodies; and our infirmaries, and
dispensaries, and hospitals, are indebted, as well for their existence
as their future maintenance, to the piety of the dead, or the liberality
of the living. Nor must we forget that, even in this great kingdom,
Rouen, at present, holds the fifth place among the towns; though it was
far from being thus, when Buonaparte, uniting the imperial to the iron
crown, overshadowed with his eagle-wings the continent from the Baltic
to Apulia; and when the mural crowns of Rome and Amsterdam stood beneath
the shield of the "good city" of Paris.

The population of Rouen is estimated at eighty-seven thousand persons,
of whom the greater number are engaged in the manufactories, which
consist principally of cotton, linen, and woollen cloths, and are among
the largest in France. At present, however, "trade is dull;" and hence,
and as the politics of a trader invariably sympathize with his cash
account, neither the peace, nor the English, nor the princes of the
Bourbon dynasty, are popular here; for the articles manufactured at
Rouen, being designed generally for exportation, ranged almost
unrivalled over the continent, during the war, but now in every town
they meet with competitors in the goods from England, which are at once
of superior workmanship and cheaper. The latter advantage is owing very
much to the greater perfection of our machinery, and, perhaps, still
more to the abundance of coals, which enables us, at so small an
expence, to keep our steam-engines in action, and thus to counterbalance
the disproportion in the charge of manual labor, as well as the many
disadvantages arising from the pressure of our heavy taxation.--But I
must cease. An English fit of growling