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Nineteen twentieths, of the nation consisted of persons in whom love of hereditary monarchy and love of constitutional freedom were combined, though in different proportions, and who were equally opposed to the total abolition of the kingly office and to the unconditional restoration of the King.
It was mainly an attempt to extend over the whole realm the kind of reforms which had been tried on a small scale in the Limousin. He suppressed the corvées, and he tacked the money payment which was substituted for that burden on to the Twentieths, an impost from which the privileged class was not exempt.
The Tory, the Whig, and the Burdettite press attacked me not only without mercy, but also without the slightest regard to truth or fair play; and that portion of the press which was either under the influence or in the pay of these three parties consisted of more than nineteen twentieths of the press of the whole kingdom!
She hung on like an Ohio Grand Army veteran to a country post-office. About half the time I didn't read her letters, and about nineteen twentieths of the time I didn't answer them. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. But it isn't so it makes them all the fonder of you. I got into the habit of thinking that while Emma might be engaged to me, I wasn't engaged to Emma.
The course commonly pursued in the employment of physicians is equally unphilosophical, and floods society with a legion of evils physical and intellectual, social and moral three fourths of which might be avoided, by the proper exercise of the medical profession, in one generation; and ultimately, nineteen twentieths, if not ninety-nine one hundredths of them.
But at that rate the direct taxes and tithes would have taken more than half the income, and the indirect taxes more than the other half, and French subjects would have been left with less than nothing to live on. Clearly, then, the twentieths did not produce anything like the theoretical eleven per cent.
With one exception, the acts passed in its first session were of little importance, relating only to the allotment of glebe lands and the payment of twentieths. The exception, which followed the voting of four entire subsidies to the King, was an Act ordaining "that this Parliament shall not determine by his Majesty's assent to this and other Bills."
If, under the Kings of the House of Stuart, when a Presbyterian was excluded from political power and from the learned professions, was daily annoyed by informers, by tyrannical magistrates, by licentious dragoons, and was in danger of being hanged if he heard a sermon in the open air, the population of Scotland was not very unequally divided between Episcopalians and Presbyterians, the rational inference is that more than nineteen twentieths of those Scotchmen whose conscience was interested in the matter were Presbyterians, and that not one Scotchman in twenty was decidedly and on conviction an Episcopalian.
Confidence in personal declarations, then, is the only indemnity for the right, which the nation has not exercised but has not lost, of itself granting and assessing the twentieths.
In the Limousin the luckless creature had a special disadvantage, for here the collector of the taille had also to collect the twentieths, and the twentieths were a tax for which even the privileged classes were liable. They, as might be supposed, cavilled, disputed, and appealed.
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