orders of men wore them, though the same orders of women still went about barefooted.  But “in France they are necessaries neither to men nor to women; the lowest rank of both sexes appearing there publicly, without any discredit, sometimes in wooden shoes and sometimes barefooted."[192] Another little circumstance struck him as a proof that the classes immediately above the rank of labourer were worse off in France than they were here.  The taste for dressing yew-trees into the shape of pyramids and obelisks by “that very clumsy instrument of sculpture” the gardener’s shears had gone out of fashion in this country, merely because it got too common, and was discarded by the rich and vain.  The multitude of persons able to indulge the taste was sufficiently great to drive the custom out of fashion.  In France, on the other hand, he found this custom still in good repute, “notwithstanding,” he adds, “that inconstancy of fashion with which we sometimes reproach the natives of that country.”  The reason was that the number of people in that country able to indulge this taste was too few to deprive the custom of the requisite degree of rarity.  “In France the condition of the inferior ranks of people is seldom so happy as it frequently is in England, and you will there seldom find even pyramids and obelisks of yew in the garden of a tallow-chandler.  Such ornaments, not having in that country been degraded by their vulgarity, have not yet been excluded from the gardens of princes and great lords."[193]

He discusses one great cause of the poorer condition of the French than of the English people.  It was generally acknowledged, he says, that “the people of France was much more oppressed by taxation than the people of Great Britain”; and the oppression he found, by personal investigation, to be all due to bad taxes and bad methods of collecting them.  The sum that reached the public treasury represented a much smaller burden per head of population than it did in this country.  Smith calculated the public revenue of Great Britain to represent an assessment of about 25s. a head of population, and in 1765 and 1766, the years he was in France, according to the best, though, he admits, imperfect, accounts he could get of the matter, the whole sum passed into the French treasury would only represent an assessment of 12s. 6d. per head of the French population.[194] Taxation ought thus to be really lighter in France than in Great Britain, but it was made into a scourge by vicious modes of assessment and collection.  Smith even suggested for France various moderate financial reforms, repealing some taxes, increasing others, making a third class uniform over the kingdom, and abolishing the farming system; but though these reforms would be sufficient to restore prosperity to a country with the resources of France, he had no hope of it being possible to carry them against the active opposition of individuals interested in maintaining things as they were.