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ART. V.-Histoire Administrative: Frochot, Préfet de la Seine (1789-1815). Par LOUIS PASSY. Paris: 1867.

THE revenues of the State,' according to Montesquieu, ‘are a 'portion of his property which every citizen gives up to possess 'the remainder in safety, or to enjoy it in an agreeable manner.' The well-known maxims of Adam Smith apply to another side of the question. The subjects of every State ought to con'tribute to the support of the Government, as nearly as possible in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the pro'tection of the State. In the observation or neglect of this 'maxim consists what is called the equality or inequality of taxation. . . . Every tax ought to be so contrived as both to 'take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible over and above what it brings into the treasury ' of the State.' These remarks refer in the first instance to the taxation levied by the Government of every country; but, besides these imposts, the internal requirements of each city also compel funds for local purposes to be raised everywhere. These requirements are not likely to be less, but to be greater, in the course of time, in proportion as the value of improved sanitary conditions becomes more widely understood. When people once understand that improved drainage means improved health, they are not likely to complain unduly of local burdens. A good system of local taxation is therefore of no slight importance. Some places are exceptionally situated, and such charges are partially or entirely defrayed from sources which other towns are not privileged to possess. Thus London raises a revenue from a coal-tax and a tax on wine. The Mersey dues perform the same kind office for Liverpool. Some small boroughs follow these high examples with envious and imitative steps, and mitigate the severity of paving and lighting rates by somewhat similar means. Town estates are of great service in some cases: we know an instance in which the property of the town, carefully administered, suffices not only to defray the modest expenses of the municipality, but to pay all the poorrates of the little burgh. Other cases doubtless exist. The ordinary methods of raising the requisite resources in less favoured localities are well known. The poor's rate, the local Board of Health rate, the rates whatever they may be, are a charge on grounded or fixed property, the ability of the burgess being assessed according to the estimated rent of his

dwelling. In France the local revenue is raised in a different manner. Those who are familiar with the subject will excuse the explanation, that the principal portion of the required sum is obtained in many places by what is called an octroi duty, levied principally on the main articles of consumption. Some variety exists in the articles selected to bear the burden. Wine and beer, for example, are taxed in some places, coals and wood in others. Paper is taxed at Bordeaux and Nice, salt is taxed in Paris alone. Sugar, which has to pay an excise duty to the Government, is taxed over again in more than two hundred places in France. Wheat is taxed in some places, and the fact that chestnuts compete with various farines' in certain towns as food for the poor is duly noted down as a cause exceptionally facilitating taxation on the cereals in those localities. By way of illustration, the duty on various kinds of flour in Marseilles recently produced more than 600,000 francs. But it is not the large cities alone which are thus situated. If the principal commercial port of France, containing 260,000 people, has to tax bread, Quimper-which, though boasting the title of capital of the department of Finisterre, scarcely numbered 10,000 inhabitants in 1842-was reduced to as undesirable a resource, being compelled to make up a deficiency in its local revenues by taxing the meat exposed for sale in the market. From the nature of the articles mentioned, it is obvious that the incidence of such a tax will fall very unequally on different classes of society, in the direct ratio of the proportion which the requirements of mere sustenance of life bear to their total expenditure. The manner also in which this description of tax must of necessity be levied tends to increase its inconvenience. The duties have to be levied as the articles subject to them are passing into the city. Many English persons are familiar with the appearance of the keen-eyed guardians of the municipal revenues, who, clad in a neat semi-military uniform, sometimes with the mystic letters 'S.P.Q.' on their caps, make their appearance while the traveller's vehicle is delayed at the barrier. Το many, doubtless, besides ourselves has the appeal been made not 'déclarer' the fresh cheese or the basket of fruit which the driver, mindful of material comforts, has purchased in the country, while his fare was investigating the monastery or the ruin. To the chance visitor the inconvenience is but temporary, but to the regular inhabitant this prevention of free traffic must bring vast inconveniences. In a fortified town, of course, the pathways through the circuit of defences must of necessity be few, but to have to endure such a limitation to traffic and to freedom of locomotion in an otherwise open city, must bring with it great evils. These are enhanced by the great difficulty

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of preventing smuggling, which has continually compelled the enlargement of the district within which the octroi duty is levied; an enlargement, the objections to which are marked in the strongest manner, by the fact that the Government will, in France, allow portions of the banlieue d'une grande ville' to be included even without the consent of the district affected. The system by which the municipal revenues of France are raised may satisfy the somewhat superficial condition imposed by Montesquieu which is quoted above, but our readers may judge for themselves whether, according to the higher standard of Adam Smith, that system would bear away the palm: a system which enhances the cost of indispensable articles of consumption, while allowing luxuries to escape almost scot free; which fetters trade, which imposes a double burden on the artisan, both by raising prices in his kitchen one-eighth or one-fourth, and by fettering the free action of the employer of labour, whose profits it diminishes; fettering some trades to such an extent, that to correct the severity of the tax, a drawback on the exportation of the manufactured articles would seem to be justly required, a tax which weighs lightly on the rich while it weighs heavily on the poor,—a tax which increases the distress of the half-starved in the garret,-cooking their taxed food over their taxed fire, while it is scarcely felt by the luxurious occupants of the drawing-room,'-a tax which divides each district of the country from its neighbour by a system of petty domestic custom-houses, necessarily causing a restraint on freedom of locomotion which is far more easily endured on the frontier of a kingdom than in the interior of a country,—a tax, the levying of which is so costly, that the expenses of collection amount in many instances to ten per cent., in some even to twelve per cent. of the produce,—a tax, the working of which is so inconvenient, that, as have been informed, an owner of a vineyard may find the trouble of paying the dues on the cask or two of wine which he might desire to bring into the town for the use of his own

1 Moins grand est le gâteau et, plus fortement le fisc le rogne. C'est vrai encore et surtout de l'impôt de consommation. Le fisc ne tient presqu'aucun compte ni de la qualité ni du prix. Le "petit bleu" qui empoisonne le maçon "contribue" autant que le Château-Margau dont se délecte l'entrepreneur; ainsi pour la marée, les viandes, les liqueurs. Personne n'ignore, de plus, que les dépenses sujettes à l'imposition prennent une part autrement large sur le budget de la mansarde que sur le budget du premier étage. A supposer, par exemple, que les impôts et octrois sur les liquides, les comestibles, et les combustibles les renchérissent de vingt pour cent, cette sur-dépense de vingt pour cent absorbera peut-être le cinquième et au-delà du revenu de l'ouvrier; elle n'augmentera pas d'un vingtieme la dépense totale du fabricant.'-Le Bilan de l'Empire, par J. E. Horn (second edition), p. 10.

household so great, and the difficulties interposed by the administration so many, that he is compelled to abandon the attempt, and to buy from the regular importer (no other term is applicable) instead of making use of the produce of his own land. A tax like this might seem to be impossible in modern Europe. Does the foregoing list include all the defects? By no means. The unequal distribution of the various octrois over the country produces other inconveniences besides those which have already been indicated. For example, in 1850 there were about 1,450 octrois in France. Of these more than 800, that is to say more than the half, were situated in twenty of the eighty-six departments into which France was at that time divided. This of itself implies a considerable inequality, which when it is more closely examined becomes still more striking. Thus the department Le Finisterre, which includes poverty-stricken Brittany, and possessed in 1851 a population of only 617,710 persons, little more than one-fiftieth part of the total population of the country, contained no less than 153-more than one-tenth of the octrois. On the other hand, the rich department of Le Nord, containing Lille and Valenciennes, and the most important coal-field in France, with 1,158,285 inhabitants, and a density of population equal to 565 persons to the square mile, a proportion greatly exceeding that of England and Wales taken generally, possessed only forty-four, about the thirty-third part of the whole number. It is, of course, a great disadvantage to manufacturers and traders in some places to have burdens imposed on them which their compeers elsewhere escape; burdens so heavy, that they appear even to outweigh the benefits offered by crowds of customers and proximity to great markets.

The objections to the system being so many, what are the countervailing advantages? The most obvious one is that the tax is at the moment lost sight of in the price of the goods when sold. 'What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve for,' is an old maxim wide as human nature, narrow as much of what for want of a better term we must call Feudal Taxation. Unlikely as it may seem, the very narrowness of the range of the impost appears to be the main recommendation; can it be called an advantage?—the truth being that the State, having taxed almost everything it could lay its hands on, magnanimously made over in this form to the municipalities the power which it was itself unable to wield. Nor was this privilege, such as it was, conceded on too easy terms. Municipalities from an early period had to drive bargains with the State, and the State was not slow to twist these bargains to its own advantage. In 1352 the town of Compiègne for the first time obtained permission

to levy an octroi for its own benefit, but only on condition of making over to the royal treasury the fourth part of the sums thus raised. Compiègne in the nineteenth century enjoys a more important privilege in possessing the hunting palace with its severely classical front, the work of the First Empire-now again occasionally the seat of Imperial festivities; but the proportion of the terms of taxation is probably not more favourable altogether to the municipality than it was five hundred years ago.

The difficulties of levying these local revenues have always been very great. War,' said the first Prefect of the Seine-his soul vexed with some thousands of lawsuits in the year-' is declared between the taxers and the taxed.' Perpetual attempts at evasion, perpetual petty smugglings, appear to be the inevitable accompaniments of an octroi system. A power on the spot, a local authority, may enter on such a contest, and carry it on successfully; but could the greatest authority of the State wage such a little war and be the victor? The municipal power, whether bearing the venerable name of the Mayor,' or dignified with the title of Prefect,' may, by his representatives, pry into the basket of eggs, or tax the butter and the fowls; but would this be seemly, would it be possible, for the Government official, the immediate servant of the Emperor? Causes like these have made over these sources of revenue to the local authorities, whether, as in Labrevalaire (department of Finisterre), the produce is fifty-two francs a year, or, as in Paris, the revenue is counted by millions sterling. The queen city of octrois indeed possesses a budget which, as M. de Parieu reminds us in his excellent Traité des Impôts,' exceeds in importance that of many States, while the municipal buildings vie with the palaces of most powerful sovereigns in magnificence and luxury. The octroi of Paris in its present form dates from the 18th October, 1798. Imposts of such a nature were, as has just been mentioned in the instance of Compiègne, early naturalized in France, and, like most of the taxation before the Revolution, had been accompanied by a great number of exemptions to privileged classes. In the days of Liberty and Equality such exemptions of course were not things to be thought of. Revolutionary fury therefore first attempted a rearrangement, and then becoming rapidly dissatisfied with its own work, swept away the reconstructed yet unconsolidated edifice. But it is one thing to abandon a revenue because it is levied on a vicious system, and another to leave unconsidered, unassisted, all the wants which that revenue had been intended to supply. Abolished in Paris in 1791, the octroi was reestablished seven years later. This interregnum, during which no sufficient substitute appears to have been found for the