Relationship of morality and taxation

"But when the duty on salt was strictly and cruelly enforced, making it penal to pick up rough dirty lumps containing small quantities that might be trhrown out with the ashes of the brine-houses on the highroads; when the price of this necessary was so increased by the tax upon it as to make it an expensive, sometimes an unattainable, luxury to the working man, government did more to demoralize the popular sense of rectitude and uprightness, than heaps of sermons could undo. And the same, though small in measure, was the consequence of many other taxes. It may seem curious to trace up the popular standard of truth to taxation; but I do not think the idea would be so very far-fetched."
 ---"The Specksioneer", from "Sylvia's Lovers" by Elizabeth Gaskell, in Great Stories of the Sea  & Ships, edited by N.C. Wyeth, 1940, page 121