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Rh before have been such a scene of desolation and sterility. But the cause lay chiefly in the rapacity with which the privileged classes had cast the whole burden of taxation on the shoulders of the people. The theory with which they justified this equitable arrangement was that "the nobility paid in blood, the clergy in prayer, and the people in money!" Poor people, whose toil and whose tithes had, in the course of time, helped the Gallican Church to accumulate in lands and money what amounted to more than half the revenue of the kingdom, and which, in spite of its tithes and taxes, was not by any means exempt from shedding its blood on the battle-fields, of which others reaped the glory and the greatness. In the feudal ages, when fighting was the badge of knighthood, there might have been some faint shadow of meaning in this invidious distinction, which became a mere farce after the invention of gunpowder; and the exemption of the aristocracy and clergy from taxation showed, in regard to this society, that it was simply relapsing into a state of natural anarchy—that of the strong preying on the weak without let or hindrance from justice.

Under the closely-woven network of this system of taxation, agriculture and commerce—the two lungs of national prosperity—were stifling for want of room. The ruling powers seemed to resemble nothing so much as those monstrous harpies of fable who, however greedily they fed, were yet gnawed by insatiable hunger. To spring ever fresh subsidies from the body of the people seemed to be the sole business of government. Among the most oppressive of these fiscal grievances (for the system was so obscure and complicated that the high financiers themselves only