If I am a Protestant in a Catholic State, or a Catholic in a Protestant State, I pay for religion which seems wrong to me and for a Church which seems to me mischievous.

If I am a skeptic, a free-thinker, indifferent or hostile to positive religions in France, I pay to-day for the support of four cults which I regard as useless or pernicious.

If I am a provincial or a peasant, I pay for maintaining an "Opera" which I never attend and for a "Sevres" and "Gobelins" of which I never see a vase or a piece of tapestry .-- In times of tranquility the extortion is covered up, but in troubled times it is nakedly apparent.

Under the revolutionary government, bands of collectors armed with pikes made raids on villages as in conquered countries;[2204] the farmer, collared and kept down by blows from the butt end of a musket, sees his grain taken from his barn and his cattle from their stable; "all scampered off on the road to the town;" while around Paris, within a radius of forty leagues, the departments fasted in order that the capital might be fed.

With gentler formalities, under a regular government, a similar extortion occurs when the State, employing a respectable collector in uniform, takes from our purse a crown too much for an office outside of its competency.