You must consider too, that every thing of this kind is, in
France, national: individuals do nothing, neither is it expected of
them; and herein consists one of the most essential differences between
France and England. To meet this great expenditure, the city is provided
with the rents of public lands, with wharfage, with tolls from the
markets and the _halles_; and, above all, with the _octroi_, a tax that
prevails through France, upon every article of consumption brought into
the towns, and is collected at the barriers. The _octroi_, like
turnpike-tolls or the post-horse duty with us, is farmed; two-thirds are
received by the government, and the remaining one-third by the town. In
Rouen it produced the last year one million four hundred and fifty
thousand francs.--If, now, this sum appears to you comparatively greater
than that of our large cities in England, you must recollect that, with
us, towns are not liable to similar charges: our corporations support no
museums, no academies, no learned bodies; and our infirmaries, and
dispensaries, and hospitals, are indebted, as well for their existence
as their future maintenance, to the piety of the dead, or the liberality
of the living.
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