increase to see how it alone, or almost alone, paid and is paying[45] for the construction of bridges, roads, canals and courts of justice, for the purchase of offices, for the establishment and support of houses of refuge, insane asylums, nurseries, post-houses for horses, fencing and riding schools, for paving and sweeping Paris, for salaries of lieutenants-general, governors, and provincial commanders, for the fees of bailiffs, seneschals and vice-bailiffs, for the salaries of financial and election officials and of commissioners dispatched to the provinces, for those of the police of the watch and I know not how many other purposes. — In the provinces which hold assemblies, where the taille would seem to be more justly apportioned, the like inequality is found.  In Burgundy[46] the expenses of the police, of public festivities, of keeping horses, all sums appropriated to the courses of lectures on chemistry, botany, anatomy and parturition, to the encouragement of the arts, to subscriptions to the chancellorship, to franking letters, to presents given to the chiefs and subalterns of commands, to salaries of officials of the provincial assemblies, to the ministerial secretaryship, to expenses of levying taxes and even alms, in short, 1,800,000 livres are spent in the public service at the charge of the Third-Estate, the two higher orders not paying a cent.

In the second place, with respect to the poll-tax, originally distributed among twenty-two classes and intended to bear equally on all according to fortunes, we know that, from the first, the clergy buy themselves off; and, as to the nobles, they manage so well as to have their tax reduced proportionately with its increase at the expense of the Third-Estate.  A count or a marquis, an intendant or a master of requests, with 40,000 livres income, who, according to the tariff of 1695,[47] should pay from 1,700 to 2,500 livres, pays only 400 livres, while a bourgeois with 6,000 livres income, and who, according to the same tariff; should pay 70 livres, pays 720.  The poll-tax of the privileged individual is thus diminished three-quarters or five-sixths, while that of the taille-payer has increased tenfold.  In the Ile-de-France,[48] on an income of 240 livres, the taille-payer pays twenty-one livres eight sous, and the nobles three livres, and the intendant himself states that he taxes the nobles only an eightieth of their revenue; that of Orléanais taxes them only a hundredth, while, on the other hand, those subject to the taille are assessed one-eleventh. — If other privileged parties are added to the nobles, such as officers of justice, employee’s of the fermes, and exempted townsmen, a group is formed embracing nearly everybody rich or well-off and whose revenue certainly greatly surpasses that of those who are subject to the taille.  Now, the budgets of the provincial assemblies inform us how much each province levies on each of the two groups:  in the Lyonnais district those subject to the taille pay 898,000 livres,