Why, then, is the practice of the government
always the opposite of its theory? Your opinion, if you please,
on this difficult matter? Explain; justify or condemn the
exchequer; take whatever course you will, provided you take some
course and say something. Remember that your readers are men,
and that they cannot excuse in a doctor, speaking ex cathedra,
such propositions as this: AS THE POOR ARE THE MOST NUMEROUS, IT
TAXES THEM WILLINGLY, CERTAIN OF COLLECTING MORE. No, Monsieur:
NUMBERS do not regulate the tax; the tax knows perfectly well
that millions of poor added to millions of poor do not make one
voter. You render the treasury odious by making it absurd, and I
maintain that it is neither the one nor the other. The poor man
pays more than the rich because Providence, to whom misery is
odious like vice, has so ordered things that the miserable
must always be the most ground down. The iniquity of the tax is
the celestial scourge which drives us towards equality. God! if
a professor of political economy, who was formerly an apostle,
could but understand this revelation!
BY THE NATURE OF THINGS, says m.
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