on the probable or certain income derived from invested or floating capital, the exchequer adds an eventual tax on capital itself, consisting of the mutation tax, assessed on property every time it changes hands through gift, inheritance, or by contract, obtaining its title under free donation or by sale, and which tax, aggravated by the timbre, is enormous, since, in most cases, it takes five, seven, nine, and up to ten and one-half per cent, on the capital transmitted.

One tax remains, and the last, that by which the state takes, no longer money, but the person himself, the entire man, soul and body, and for the best years of his life, namely, military service.  It is the revolution which has rendered this so burdensome; formerly it was light, for, in principle, it was voluntary.  The militia, alone, was raised by force, and, in general, among the country people; the peasants furnished men for it by casting lots.  But it was simply a supplement to the active army, a territorial and provincial reserve, a distinct, sedentary body of reinforcements, and of inferior rank which, except in case of war, never marched; it turned out but nine days of the year, and, after 1778, never turned out again.  In 1789 it comprised in all 75,260 men, and for eleven years their names, inscribed on the registers, alone constituted their presence in the ranks.

Napoleon put this military system in order.  Henceforth every male able-bodied adult must pay the debt of blood; no more exemptions in the way of military service; all young men who had reached the required age drew lots in the conscription and set out in turn according to the order fixed by their drafted number.

But Napoleon is an intelligent creditor; he knows that this debt is “most frightful and most detestable for families,” that his debtors are real, living men, and therefore different in kind, that the head of the state should keep these differences in mind, that is to say, their condition, their education, their sensibility and their vocation; that, not only in their private interest, but again in the interest of the public, not merely through prudence, but also through equity, all should not be indistinguishably restricted to the same mechanical pursuit, to the same manual labour, to the same indefinite servitude of soul and body.

Napoleon also exempts the conscript who has a brother in the active army, the only son of a widow, the eldest of three orphans, the son of a father seventy-one years old dependent on his labour, all of whom are family supports.  He joins with these all young men who enlist in one of his civil militias, in his ecclesiastical militia, or in his university militia, pupils of the Ecole Normale, seminarians for the priesthood, on condition that they shall engage to do service in their vocation, and do it effectively, some for ten years, others for life, subject to a discipline more rigid, or nearly as rigid, as military discipline.