8. Moreover, good and multiform Accompts being kept of the People, this Tax may be also easily speedily and inexpensively collected; and also being capable of being computed aforehand, may be fitted and seized according to the needs of the Prince.
9. As for Offices, they are indeed Dignities for the most part, but paid for by the trouble of administring them; as for example, to be an Alderman suppose of London, is indeed an honour, yet many pay five hundred pounds to be excused from receiving it.
Nevertheless it may not be improper to tax Offices sought; or such as are accepted although they might be refused: And on the other side no Titulado should be forced to pay Poll-money according to his Title, if he be contented to lay it down, and never resume it more.
10. The Titles of Faculties and Callings ought to be no Qualification in a Poll-money, because they do not necessarily nor probably inferr ability to pay, but carry with them vaste inequalities. But therefore if a man by his Licence to practise get much, it may be presumed he will spend accordingly; in which net the way of Excize will certainly take him, as it will all the Officers aforementioned.
11. Harth-money seems to be a Poll-money, but is not, being rather a way of Accumulative Excize; of which hereafter.
[CHAP. VIII.]
Of Lotteries.
Men that accept Titles may foresee, that they may be taxed by them as aforesaid, (although it be unlikely (one House of Parliament being all Tituladoes, and the greatest part of the other being such also) that any such way of Leavy should pass) and therefore they do as it were à priori consent unto the Tax in their own Individuals.
2. Now in the way of Lottery men do also tax themselves in the general, though out of hopes of Advantage in particular: A Lottery therefore is properly a Tax upon unfortunate self-conceited fools; men that have good opinion of their own luckiness, or that have believed some Fortune-teller or Astrologer, who had promised them great success about the time and place of the Lottery, lying Southwest perhaps from the place where the destiny was read.