We, indeed, tax our beer; but the imposition on small beer is very far from heavy.  In no part of England are eatables of any kind the object of taxation.  In almost every other country in Europe they are excised, more or less.  I have by me the state of the revenues of many of the principal nations on the Continent; and, on comparing them with ours, I think I am fairly warranted to assert, that England is the most lightly taxed of any of the great states of Europe.  They, whose unnatural and sullen joy arises from a contemplation of the distresses of their country, will revolt at this position.  But if I am called upon, I will prove it beyond all possibility of dispute; even though this proof should deprive these gentlemen of the singular satisfaction of considering their country as undone; and though the best civil government, the best constituted, and the best managed revenue that ever the world beheld, should be thoroughly vindicated from their perpetual clamors and complaints.  As to our neighbor and rival France, in addition to what I have here suggested, I say, and when the author chooses formally to deny, I shall formally prove it, that her subjects pay more than England, on a computation of the wealth of both countries; that her taxes are more injudiciously and more oppressively imposed; more vexatiously collected; come in a smaller proportion to the royal coffers, and are less applied by far to the public service.  I am not one of those who choose to take the author’s word for this happy and flourishing condition of the French finances, rather than attend to the changes, the violent pushes and the despair of all her own financiers.  Does he choose to be referred for the easy and happy condition of the subject in France to the remonstrances of their own parliaments, written with such an eloquence, feeling, and energy, as I have not seen exceeded in any other writings?  The author may say, their complaints are exaggerated, and the effects of faction.  I answer, that they are the representations of numerous, grave, and most respectable bodies of men, upon the affairs of their own country.  But, allowing that discontent and faction may pervert the judgment of such venerable bodies in France, we have as good a right to suppose that the same causes may full as probably have produced from a private, however respectable person, that frightful, and, I trust I have shown, groundless representation of our own affairs in England.

The author is so conscious of the dangerous effects of that representation, that he thinks it necessary, and very necessary it is, to guard against them.  He assures us, “that he has not made that display of the difficulties of his country, to expose her counsels to the ridicule of other states, or to provoke a vanquished enemy to insult her; nor to excite the people’s rage against their governors, or sink them into a despondency of the public welfare.”  I readily admit this apology for his intentions.  God forbid