the death-rate from all those diseases that are the peculiar product of
luxury and evil living. Paupers also, the unemployed, cripples,
imbeciles, deaf mutes, and the clergy escaped under this beneficent and
equable statute, and we may sum up the whole policy by saying that never
was a law acclaimed with so much happy bewilderment nor subject to less
expressed criticism than this.

It was, moreover, easy to estimate in this new fashion the total revenue
of the State, since its produce had been accurately set down by
statisticians of the utmost eminence, and one of these diverse documents
had been taken for the basis of the new fiscal regime.

In practice also the collection was easy. Overseers would attend the
harvest with large carts, prong the tenth turnip, hoick up the tenth
sheaf of wheat, bucket out the tenth gallon of ale, and so forth. In the
markets every tenth animal was removed by Imperial officers, every tenth
newspaper was impounded as it left the press, and every tenth drink
about to be consumed in the hostelries of the Empire was, after a
simulacrum of proffering it, suddenly removed by the waiter and poured
into a receptacle, the keys of which were very jealously guarded.

It was the same with the liberal professions: of the fee received by a
barrister in the Criminal Courts a tenth was regularly demanded at the
door when the verdict had been given and the prisoner whom he had
defended passed out to execution. The tenth knock-out in the prize ring
received by the professional pugilist was followed by the immediate
sequestration of his fee for that particular encounter, and the tenth
aria vibrating from the lips of a prima donna was either compounded for
at a certain rate or taken in kind by the official who attended at every
performance of grand opera.