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So I walked up and down with a sore heart, as a child will when it has been punished for no fault, and prayed that we provincials might yet teach the regulars a lesson. Yet they were brave men, most of them, whom I could not but admire. A kindlier, gallanter roan than Sir Peter Halket I had never seen, no, nor ever shall see.
We have already mentioned the comprehensive regulation of taxation; the extension of the exemptions from tribute, the general lowering of the direct taxes, the limitation of the system of -decumae- to Africa and Sardinia, the complete setting aside of middlemen in the collection of the direct taxes, were most beneficial reforms for the provincials.
The royalists were greatly superior in number, but were under the disadvantage of being compelled to cross the bridge, the planks of which were partly taken up, in the face of the intrenchments occupied by the provincials.
This last charge became frequently a means of great oppression, and several ways were from time to time attempted, but with little effect, to confine it within reasonable bounds. Amongst the extraordinary impositions must be reckoned the obligation they laid on the provincials to labor at the public works, after the manner of what the French call the corvée, and we term statute-labor.
The population was of a very mixed character, consisting partly of true Asiatics, and partly of Asiatic Greeks, the descendants of the old colonists, and containing also a large Roman element merchants who were there for purposes of trade, many of them bankers and money-lenders, and speculators who farmed the imperial taxes, and were by no means scrupulous in the matter of fleecing the provincials.
In one of the newspapers, there is an admirable letter of a New England man, copied from the London Chronicle, defending the provincials with an ability worthy of Franklin, and somewhat in his style. The letter is remarkable, also, because it takes up the cause of the whole range of colonies, as if the writer looked upon them all as constituting one country, and that his own.
But the direct taxes consisted either, as in most provinces, of fixed sums of money payable by the communities which of itself excluded the intervention of Roman capitalists or, as in Sicily and Sardinia, of a ground-tenth, the levying of which for each particular community was leased in the provinces themselves, so that wealthy provincials regularly, and the tributary communities themselves very frequently, farmed the tenth of their districts and thereby kept at a distance the dangerous Roman middlemen.
When Monsieur Mignon returned to the salon, and Modeste, having received a last bow from the two friends as the carriage turned, went back to her seat, a weighty discussion took place, such as provincials invariably hold over Parisians after a first interview. Gobenheim repeated his phrase, "Is he rich?" as a chorus to the songs of praise sung by Madame Latournelle, Modeste, and her mother.
For studying out a question in all its bearings, there are no folk in this world like savages, peasants, and provincials; and this is how, when they proceed from thought to action, you find every contingency provided for from beginning to end.
At present the bishops do not possess churches with prebendaries nor is any money set aside for that. The regular prelates are the provincials of the four mendicant orders, namely, St. Dominic, St. Augustine, St. Francis, the Society of Jesus, and the discalced Augustinians. Each prelate governs his own order and visits the houses.
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