in the modern history of Great Britain and France is almost wholly owing to the difference in the character of the peoples. It would be idle to deny that there is some foundation for this, but it may fairly be maintained that this cause is much less important than is generally supposed. It is the old and vexed question of heredity as against circumstance and education. For obvious reasons it is not possible to carry on experiments with regard to individuals, but with nations the case is quite different. A variety of treatment for one, two, or three hundred years may change fundamentally the character of institutions and with them of races. There are two things which have thus modified English history, — the absence of foreign wars and of an alien religion.

On the continent of Europe the introduction of standing armies and the revolution in the art of war, which made it a 66 distinct science and a distinct trade," had emancipated rulers from the chief restraint on their power the fear of an armed people- and enabled them to either utterly sweep away or reduce to empty formalities the national assemblies, which had once been as free and as potent as our own early parliaments. The free constitutions of Castile and Arragon were successively overthrown by Charles V. and Philip II.1

From the time of the Norman conquest there has never been an invasion of British soil by a foreign army; and only once, at the time of the Spanish Armada, has there been any serious fear of it. Wars there have been, carried on abroad by English men and money, but always as a kind of amateur work, limited, besides all else, by transportation by sea. The nation could therefore at any time compel the king to abandon a war by refusing supplies, and was not itself forced by the necessities of self-preservation to surrender its liberties into the hands of a despotic ruler. Henry VII., when he succeeded to the throne after the wars of the Roses, was sufficiently despotic in temper.

1 Taswell-Langmead, op. cit., pp. 363, 364.

Throughout his reign of twenty-four years he summoned Parliament only seven times, and during the last thirteen years only once, in 1504 - always to obtain money.1

But he had not at command the expedients employed about the same time by Louis XI. to undermine the power of the French nobility, a process which was fearfully accelerated by the Italian wars of Charles VIII. and Louis XII. Moreover, Henry VII., as well as Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, was born of native parents and English in feeling and sympathies. The nation was

saved from such a curse as the importation of Catherine de Médicis. When, in the later generations, the blood of the Guises and of Henrietta Maria made its appearance in the Stuarts, the power of Parliament had become sufficiently established to sustain the conflict. Strafford and Laud corresponded in character and purpose with Richelieu and Mazarin, but the foundation laid in the two countries by the work of the previous one hundred and fifty years was wholly different. Parliament had continued steadily to exert its power and maintain its strength, so that it was able to carry the nation through the long struggle from the accession of Charles I. to that of William III., and was then saved from the consequences of its own weakness by the development of cabinet government, which we have already traced. Wars, like other public business, are ultimately a question of taxation. The English Parliament, in asserting its power against the Crown, kept a firm hold upon taxation, and for that very purpose was compelled to adjust that taxation so as to command. the support of various interests.

Unquestionably the English aristocracy is of a haughtier nature than that of France, and less disposed to mingle familiarly with those who live in a humbler condition; but the obligations of its own rank imposed that duty upon it. It submitted that it might command.

1 Ibid., p. 374.

For centuries no inequality of taxation has existed in England except such exemptions as have been successively introduced for the relief of the indigent classes. Observe to what results different political principles may lead nations so nearly contiguous. In the eighteenth century the poor man in England enjoyed exemption from taxation, the rich in France. In one country the aristocracy has taken upon itself the heaviest public burdens in order to retain the government of the State; in the other the aristocracy retained to the last exemption from taxation as a compensation for the loss of political power.1

The States-General in France in the Middle Ages retained the same right of adjusting the taxation as the English Parliament.

The greater part of the general subsidies voted by the three Orders in the course of the fourteenth century were levied equally on the clergy, the nobility, and the people.2

It was in the struggle for the expulsion of the English from France under the lead of Joan of Arc that Charles VII. began to violate this rule.

I venture to assert that when the French nation, exhausted by the protracted disturbances which had accompanied the captivity of King John and the madness of Charles VI., suffered the Crown to levy a general tax without the consent of the people or of the states of the realm, and when the nobility had the baseness to allow the middle and lower classes to be so taxed on condition that its own exemption should be maintained, at that very time was sown the seed of almost all the vices and almost all the abuses which afflicted the ancient society of France during the remainder of its existence, and ended by causing its violent dissolution. . . . When the king first undertook to levy taxes by his own authority, he perceived that he must select a tax which did not appear to fall directly on the nobles; for that class, formidable and dangerous to the monarchy itself, would never have submitted to an innovation so prejudicial to their own interests. The tax selected by the Crown was, therefore, a tax from which the nobles were exempt, and that tax was the taille.

It was the multiplication of this tax which made the taille one of the principal grievances of the Revolution. The Crown, having thus assumed the power of taxation, 1 De Tocqueville, "France before the Revolution," Book II., Chap. X.

applied it not only arbitrarily but in the worst and most destructive forms. As their demands increased,

the kings of France would neither convoke the States-General to obtain subsidies, nor would they provoke the nobility to demand that measure by imposing taxes on them without it. Hence arose that prodigious and mischievous fecundity of financial expedients which so peculiarly characterized the administration of the public resources during the last three centuries of the old French monarchy.

It is necessary to study the details of the administrative and financial history of that period to form a conception of the violent and unwarrantable proceedings which the want of money may prescribe even to a mild government, but without publicity and control, when once time has sanctioned its power and delivered it from the dread of revolution, that last safeguard of nations.

Every page in these annals tells of possessions of the Crown first sold and then resumed as unsalable; of contracts violated and of vested interests ignored; of sacrifices wrung at every crisis from the public creditor, and of incessant repudiations of public engagements.

Privileges granted in perpetuity were perpetually resumed. Thus Louis XIV. annulled all the titles of nobility acquired in the preceding ninety-two years, though most of them had been conferred by himself; but they could only be retained upon furnishing a fresh subsidy, all these titles having been obtained by surprise, said the edict. The same example was duly followed by Louis XV. eighty years later. The militiaman was forbidden to procure a substitute, for fear, it was said, of raising the price of recruits to the State. Towns, corporations, and hospitals were compelled to break their own engagements in order that they might be able to lend money to the Crown. Parishes were restrained from undertaking works of public improvement, lest by such a division of their resources they should pay their direct taxes with less punctuality.1

The wretched system of farming the taxes was another of the fatal expedients of finance, which in the long run. could have but one result. Passing over the crushing weight of direct taxation upon the poor, including the corvée or forced labor of the peasants upon the highways, take one example of the indirect methods.

A boat laden with wine from Languedoc, Dauphiny, or Roussillon, ascending the Rhone and descending the Loire to reach Paris, through

1 Ibid.

the Briare canal, pays on the way, leaving out charges on the Rhone, from thirty-five to forty kinds of duty, not comprising the charges on entering Paris. It pays these at fifteen or sixteen places, the multiplied payments obliging the carriers to devote twelve or fifteen days more to the passage than they otherwise would if their duties could be paid at one bureau. The charges on the routes by water are particularly heavy. From Pontarlier to Lyons there are twenty-five or thirty tolls; from Lyons to Aigues-Mortes there are others, so that whatever costs ten sous at Burgundy amounts to fifteen or eighteen sous at Lyons, and to over twenty-five sous at Aigues-Mortes. The wine at last reaches the barriers of the city where it is to be drunk. Here it pays an octroi of forty-seven francs per hogshead. Entering Paris, it goes into the tapster's or vintner's cellar, where it again pays from thirty to forty francs for the duty on selling it at retail. At Rennes the dues and duties on a barrel of Bordeaux wine, together with a fifth over and above the tax, local charges eight sous per pound, and the octroi, amount to more than seventy-two livres, exclusive of the purchase money. These charges fall on the wine-grower, since if consumers do not purchase he is unable to sell.1

Compare this with the provision of the Constitution of the United States that all duties, imports, and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States, and that no tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state, and ask if the difference is not sufficient in the course of a century to affect the whole character of a people.

The next consequence of the absorption of the power of taxation by the Crown in France was the attempt to break the political power of the nobility, and for both purposes to create hostility between classes. For this the most effective of all instruments is inequality of taxation. The English nobility, by the habit of combining in Parliament with the squires and townspeople to control the sovereign, drew gradually nearer to them, and thus was produced that fusion of classes which has always been a marked feature in Great Britain. De Tocqueville, writing of the early part of the eighteenth century, says:

1 Taine, "Ancien Régime," Book V., Chap. II.

1