Note 9 — Some Doubts on the supposed Impossibility of laying all Taxes on Consumption.

I must confess I wish also that a little time could be spared to examine whether all kinds of taxes, already devised or to be devised, already established or to be established, on any other object but consumption, whatever may be the appellation with which they may be honoured or disgraced, from the land-tax down to the shop-tax, are not in fact so many poll-taxes:—that is to say, I wish they would be pleased to examine, whether that man whose hand is obliged, under pain of distress, to give at such a day such a sum, can, upon due recollection, disguise to himself that his head is as really taxed, as if the subsidy to be paid was called a poll-tax, or la taille. If I am not mistaken, the case is this: the shopkeeper feels that he ought not to pay a tax upon his shop; he pays it and cries out like an eagle; he is right: the land proprietor does not know that he ought not to pay a tax upon his land; he pays it and says nothing; he is wrong: the Minister wanted money; he thought that nothing remained untaxed; he suspected that the land proprietor would at last cry out as loud as the shopkeeper, if the land-tax was increased; he taxed the shops: a shop, in truth, does not appear (very evidently at least) more sacred than the land upon which it is erected.—It is not at all impossible, but that in some few years all these misunderstandings will be talked of with as little reverence as witchcraft; but till then, the good mother Nature must work underhand, as she ever did, and probably ever will.