ing with disrespect the ceremonies of the Church, and screaming out violently commands of insanity to persons in the street? and if she had a wild disordered look, and went in filthy attire, decency alone required her seclusion. As for the imputation which Mr. Bergenroth has endeavoured to fix upon Charles V. of having by silence countenanced a suggestion of torture, such imputation is founded entirely upon Mr. Bergenroth's incorrect translation of the Spanish, and his own mistaken conception of the facts. We will quote the passage of the letter upon which Mr. Bergenroth relies, premising that on various occasions there had been a question of changing the Queen's residence from Tordesillas to Arevalo, since the latter was a more healthy and convenient town. The Marquis of Denia wrote to Charles to advise that the change should be made; but knowing the nature of the Queen's madness, he adds:

'Your Majesty may take it for granted that this cannot be done with the consent of her Highness. For as she refuses to do anything required for her life, and does exactly the contrary, I do not know how she can consent to this. And in truth if in many things your Majesty were to use force (hazer premia) it would serve God and do her Highness herself service and benefit, since the persons who are in the disposition of her Highness (i. e. lunatics), stand in need of this. Already the Queen, grandmother of your Majesty, served and treated in this way the Queen our lady her daughter. Your Majesty may do what seems best in this case.

'The manner in which the removal of her Highness from here should be effected seems to me to be this. First of all, means of persuasion ought to be employed in order to see whether her Highness would do it of her own will, and if that does not suffice, the President of the Council ought to come with an order from your Majesty to all the persons who are here. He is to take her Highness, to put her by night into a litter and carry her without stopping to Arevalo. I say the President because I know that he would perform according to the letter this and anything else your Majesty may command. Two or three councillors should also come with him, that it may seem as though it were done with the consent of the whole council and the whole kingdom. I shall keep everything ready, but as I am to remain in the service of her Highness it would be inconvenient for me to take part openly in this affair, because I should thus be much disliked by her Highness.' (P. 405.)

The words upon which Mr. Bergenroth relies to prove that Juana was put to the torture are hazer premia. They will not bear that signification: premia means compulsion, not physical pressure. The whole passage proves that the advice of the Marquis of Denia simply was that if the Queen would not consent to quit Tordesillas, she should be taken by

force, and be put by main strength into her litter. He justifies this advice by stating that Isabella, the Queen's mother, had frequently used coercive measures towards her daughter; and it is probable indeed that these coercive measures were used towards her in the very outbreak of her madness. Moreover, the Marquis of Denia did not wish himself to have anything to do with this forcible removal, because he would fall into her Highness's bad graces-a proof indeed that he was not accustomed to have recourse to such measures.

Mr. Bergenroth, who seems determined to go on crescendo, says the treatment of Queen Juana after her interview with the comuneros was worse than before. For this statement there is no evidence whatever. We only know that she lived on for five and thirty years, and that her hallucinations, sullenness, obstinacy, and outbursts of temper increased as she drew nearer to her end. She believed that she was possessed by evil spirits and that she saw a great cat lacerating the souls of Ferdinand and Philip the Fair. Her existence became at last something more wretched and loathsome than that of any animal; for weeks and months she would not leave her bed, so it may be imagined into what a state she fell. After her daughter Catalina was taken away from her to be Queen of Portugal, she lived nearly quite alone, as to her family, with the exception of the occasional visits of the Emperor.

The manner in which the insane Queen expired at the age of seventy-five, has been portrayed by Mr. Bergenroth in a fashion to suit his own unfounded theory, and the report of the priest who attended her in her last moments and administered the last sacrament to her, is perverted entirely from its real significance by a mistranslation of the Spanish.

In April 1555, while Charles was meditating his abdication in Flanders, and his daughter Juana was at the head of affairs in Spain, it became apparent that the unhappy mad lady at Tordesillas was near to die. Mr. Bergenroth allows that she might then have been mad-driven mad-and, he adds, she might have been permitted to die in peace, but the honour (others might say the religious feeling and the filial affection) of the Imperial family required that Queen Juana should not depart without receiving the Holy Sacrament. Stormy scenes took place in the interior of the old palace; screams were heard in the neighbourhood." Were those strange scenes and those screams of which Mr. Bergenroth speaks the mere displays of some last paroxysm of insanity— of visions, perhaps, of the great cat lacerating the souls of

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Ferdinand and of Philip?-or were they brought about by attempting to force the sacrament down the throat of the mad and dying Queen? One might infer that Mr. Bergenroth's opinion was the latter. He then proceeds to quote the account of Fray Domingo de Soto, who was summoned to Tordesillas to confess the Queen, and arrived there on the morning of the 11th of April. He had a long conversation with Juana • without witnesses,' adds Mr. Bergenroth, as if the case were remarkable for a confessor to see his penitent alone. Fray Domingo de Soto wrote the same day to Juan Vasquez, who was then chief Secretary of State in Spain, his report of the state of her Highness. She was evidently sinking fast. In his letter was the following passage, of which Mr. Bergenroth has quite mistaken the sense:

' And then I remained with her Highness alone a considerable time, and surely, blessed be our Lord, she spoke words to me which have consoled me; but her Highness is not in a condition to take the sacrament of the Eucharist, yet the sacrament of the extreme unction (being not so grave a matter as the other), I think may be given to her, even though we should wait till she has less discernment, for that sacrament does not require so much; and we believe her Highness with the discernment she now has would not submit to it (that is, to taking the sacrament of extreme unction alone without the Eucharist), from motives of dignity (or decency), (since her understanding is now so good that she would desire both sacraments—and I do not think she can properly receive both), I think she will not survive the night.'* (P. lviii.)

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The Queen took the sacrament at an advanced period of the night, and on Good Friday, the 12th of April, between five and six in the morning, she expired, thanking our Lord that her life was at an end, and recommending her soul to him.' Sandoval says her last words were 'Jesus Christ crucified be with me.'

Such was the end of Juana la Loca, and our readers are now in a condition to judge whether, with all our obligations to Mr. Bergenroth as a collector of documents, we should be justified in placing confidence in him as an expounder of their true import.

* The words in brackets we have added to complete the sense. Mr. Bergenroth, besides other mistranslations, translates aunque, even though, by however, and so alters the sense of the whole passage.

VOL. CXXXI. NO. CCLXVIII.

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ART. III. Traité des Impôts, considérés sous le rapport historique, économique et politique, en France et à l'étranger. Par M. ESQUIROU DE PARIEU, Vice-Président du Conseil d'État, Membre de l'Institut Impérial de France, etc. 2nd ed. 4 vols. 8vo. Paris: 1866.

AN

N eminent German writer on Finance has observed that it would be difficult to discover in the whole domain of political economy a topic more generally misunderstood, more disfigured by false views, more distorted by a partial study, than that of Taxation. This remark is entitled to the more weight and authority as it proceeds from a country where, for the last century and a half, the principles of financial and fiscal science, included under the term Cameral-Wissenschaft, have constituted part of the academic curriculum in several universities. In France and England, where there is less special teaching of this kind than in Germany, most of the recent treatises on the history and theory of taxation are deficient in breadth of treatment. Their illustrations are entirely local where they ought to be general. A statesman of the present day is unable to bound his horizon, even if he wished it, by the frontiers of his own country. The evergrowing tendency to more intimate association of neighbouring nations, and to a closer assimilation in their respective administrative conditions, renders a comparison of the principles and practice guiding their various systems of taxation of great importance to all of them. Hence the utility of such monographs on the branches into which these systems are divided, as have proceeded from the researches of M. de Parieu. His • Traité des Impôts' deserves to rank as one of the most suc cessful attempts yet made to investigate taxation, in its doctrine, its history, and its practice; it is written in a calm and philosophical spirit, and, so far as the vastness of the subject will admit, in a manner which is sufficiently exhaustive without being tediously diffuse. In the two thousand pages of these volumes will be found a rich store of information and of facts, and many valuable statistics. Conscious that the very elaborateness of the work would deter some readers from approaching it, the aphorism of Seneca, Longum iter est per præcepta, 'breve et efficax per exempla,' has been appropriately chosen as an epigraph.

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M. de Parieu brings to his task qualifications of the highest order. The theory and the legislative and practical principles of French taxation have long been familiar to him in his

positions as Deputy for his native department of Le Cantal, President of its Conseil Général, Minister of Education and Religion under the Republic of 1848, and Vice-President of the Council of State and President of some of its sections under the Empire. More recently still, M. de Parieu has accepted office, in the Ollivier Ministry, as President of the Council of State. The friends of progress may look with confidence to his advocacy, in the Cabinet, of liberal and equitable adjustments of the burden of taxation. To this subject, and to that of international coinage, he has devoted untiring attention and research; and they can scarcely fail to continue to be the leading objects of his political career. An extensive acquaintance with foreign languages, writers and statesmen, has afforded him the opportunity of treating his subject from an enlarged and cosmopolitan point of view; and, under the leading heads of taxes upon persons, riches, luxuries, consumption, and deeds or instruments, all kinds of imperial, general, provincial, county and local rates in various parts of the world are discussed with much patience and research. At the same time the general scope of the inquiry is rather into the history of particular taxes than into that of various systems of taxation.

If the support of government in its crudest form of administration and protection were the sole object for which the contributions of the subjects of a state were required, a perfect system of equitable burdens upon each of them might probably be attained by an application of the first of the four celebrated maxims of Adam Smith, namely, that the contributions should be in proportion to the revenue which each subject enjoys under the protection of the state. But, in the march of later civilisation, the vast and daily augmenting increase in the budgets of nearly all countries, for public education, public works, the administration of railways and roads; the promotion of navigation, agriculture, trade, industry, and the fine arts; the business of savings' banks, annuities, and friendly societies; government insurance, telegraphs, and other enterprises; all mark the progressive interference of the State in the social wants and concerns, physical and moral, of the people. All this renders the problem of right or wrong, and of comparatively better or worse systems of taxation, one of exceeding difficulty, delicacy, and uncertainty. We may well pause to consider whether Ançillon was not well founded in his apprehension of the abuses to which this disposition to extend the purview of public expenditure may ultimately tend. The increase of taxation may easily, he observed, become excessive through the desire to govern too much, and through the vain