Ludwig Lavater on rulers impoverishing the people through oppressive taxes

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Reformed Covenanter

Cancelled Commissioner
Neither are Kings and Princes blameless in this case of Famine, who though their charge be to provide for the good of the people, yet they utterly neglect them, rather impoverishing their subjects, yea, even in the dearest years, burthening them with taxes and subsidies: the Court is costly, and will be gallant: horses, hounds, hawks, harlots, jesters, must be maintained, who wrings for it? the poor subject, who must rather be undone, then the Court should want: from whence followeth this inconvenience, that the people being thus exhausted, and drunk up by these sucking subsidies and exactions, many of them become desperate, and utterly neglect their family at home, and setting the Hare’s head to the Goose gibbets, and all that they have at a mumme [sic] chance, will rather loosely misspend it themselves, then thus to be made sponges, and that which they have to be squeezed from them by crushing Courtiers.

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