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In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. I wrote this in 1789, the year the new Constitution took effect and the year the French Revolution began. I was eighty-three and had outlived most of my generation. I had been a printer, a scientist, a diplomat, a postmaster, a founding father, and a constitutional convention delegate. Death I could calculate; I had already ordered my own gravestone. Taxes I had helped design; I had some authority on both subjects.