Each personally receives as much in the great dividend of security, health, and convenience, in the fruit of the vast works of utility and enjoyment due to improved communications, which preserve health, assist traffic, and beautify the locality, and without which, in town as well as in the country, life would be impossible or intolerable.
But these works which cost so much, these defensive operations and apparatus against inundations, fires, epidemics, and contagions, these 500,000 kilometers of district and department roads, these dikes, quays, bridges, public gardens, and promenades, this paving, drainage, sweeping and lighting, these aqueducts and supplies of drinkable water, all this is paid for by somebody, and, since it is not done by the small taxpayer, it is the large or average taxpayer who pays for it.

The latter then, bears, besides his obligatory weight, a gratuitous surplus burden, consisting of the weight of which the other is relieved.
Evidently the greater the number of the relieved, the heavier will be this overweight, and the relieved count by millions.

Two millions and a half of declared poor[4217] are relieved of any direct tax, and, therefore, of all the centimes which have just increased the burden.
Out of 8 millions of real-estate owners,[4218] 3 millions, considered as insolvent, pay neither the real estate tax nor the centimes which it comprises.

In the octroi towns, it is not the minority but the majority of the inhabitants who are relieved in the way just described; in Paris,[4219] out of 685,000 rentals, 625,000, in other terms twelve out of thirteen lodgings, are exempt, wholly or in part, from the personal tax, the principal and "additional centimes." On each franc of this principal there are 96 of these superadded centimes for the benefit of the town and department and because the department and the town expend a good deal, and because receipts are essential for the settlement of these accounts, this or that sum is noted beforehand in every chapter of receipts, and the main thing now is to have this paid in, and it must be paid by somebody; it matters little whether the peasants are few or numerous; if among thirteen taxable persons there is only one that pays, so much the worse for him, for he must pay for himself and the other twelve.

Such is the case in Paris, which accounts for the "additional centimes" here being so numerous,[4220] owing to there being less than 60,000 rentals for the acquittance of the entire tax, and, besides paying their own debt, they must discharge the indebtedness of 625,000 other rentals, the tax on which is reduced or null .-- Frequently, before the Revolution, some rich convent or philanthropic seignior would pay the taxes of his poor neighbors out of his own pocket; willingly or not, 60,000 Parisians, more or less well lodged, now hand over the same sum, bestow the same charity, on 625,000 thousand badly or only tolerably lodged Parisians; among these 60,000 benefactors whom the exchequer obliges to be benevolent, 34,800 who pay from 1000 to 3000 francs rent, bestow, under this heading, a pretty large sum for charitable purposes, while 14,800, who pay more than 3000 francs rent, pay a very large one.
Other branches of direct taxation, in the country as well as in the city, present the same spectacle: it is always the rich or the well-to-do taxpayers who, through their over-tax, more or less completely relieve the poor or straitened taxpayers; it is always the owners of large or small properties, those who pay heavy or average licenses, the occupants of lodgings with more than five openings,[4221] and whose locative value surpasses 1000 francs, who in local expenditure pay besides their own dues the dues of others and, through their additional centimes, almost entirely defray the expenses of the department and commune .-- This is nearly always the case in a local society, except when it chances to possess an abundant income, arising from productive real estate, and is able to provide for its wants without taxing its members; apart from this rare exception, it is forced to tax some in order to relieve others.