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They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.
The poor father was telegraphed for but arrived too late, the blow saddening for ever an honest and laborious life. This farmer was well- to-do, but had other children. How then could he pay the fine imposed upon the defaulter? And, of course, French service involved lifelong separation. Cruel, indeed, is the dilemma of the unfortunate annexe. But the blood-tax is felt in other ways.
Disguise it as he might, all his former wars had been essentially wars of conquest, and, however patiently they might endure it, the peasantry of France, in thousands upon thousands of humble cottages, groaned under the exaction of crushing taxes worst of all, the blood-tax of conscription in order to enable one man, in the name of France, to usurp the empire of the world.
And it is here that James urges, as his "moral equivalent of war," the conscription of our young men "to coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, to the frames of sky-scrapers," there to pay "their blood-tax in the immemorial human warfare against nature."
'The French have done much for the regeneration of Italy, wrote an English observer in 1810; 'they have destroyed the prejudices of the inhabitants of the small states of Upper Italy by uniting them; they have done away with the Pope; they have made them soldiers. But there was the reverse side of the medal: the absence everywhere of the national spirit which alone could have consolidated the new régime on a firm basis; the danger which the language ran of losing its purity by the introduction of Gallicisms; the shameless robbery of pictures, statues, and national heirlooms of every kind for the replenishment of French museums; the bad impression left in the country districts by the abuses committed by the French soldiery on their first descent, and kept alive by the blood-tax levied in the persons of thousands of Italian conscripts sent to die, nobody knew where or why; the fields untilled, and Rachel weeping for her children: all these elements combined in rendering it difficult for the governments established under French auspices to survive the downfall of the man to whose sword they owed their existence.
The gentle sea-breeze blew Marguerite's hair about her face, and sent the ends of her soft lace fichu waving round her, like a white and supple snake. She tried to pierce the distance far away, beyond which lay the shores of France: that relentless and stern France which was exacting her pound of flesh, the blood-tax from the noblest of her sons.
He spoke for a nation to which autonomy had been accorded by statute; he preferred men to feel for themselves rather than be asked to admit that no self-governing nation will submit voluntarily to the imposition of the blood-tax without its own most formal consent.
In its sacred dust lie buried our old hero Haroun al Raschid, Firdousi, Persia’s greatest epic poet, and the holy Imaum Riza, within whose shrine every criminal may take refuge from even the Shah himself until the payment of a blood-tax, or a debtor until the giving of a guarantee for debt. No infidel can enter there. Meshed was the pivotal point upon which our wheel of fortune was to turn.
Why should men not some day feel that it is worth a blood-tax to belong to a collectivity superior in any ideal respect? Why should they not blush with indignant shame if the community that owns them is vile in any way whatsoever? Individuals, daily more numerous, now feel this civic passion.
For the three hundred and odd souls the Government here provides schoolmaster, schoolmistress, and a second female teacher for the infant school, their salaries being double those paid under the Empire. Now a word concerning the blood-tax. Rich and well-to-do French residents in the annexed provinces can afford to send their sons across the frontier and pay the heavy fines imposed for default.
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