A seventeenth-century tradition of British political arithmetic merged the empiricism of Sir Francis Bacon with an early version of statistical science. William Petty, John Graunt, and Gregory King were leaders in this work. They used no higher mathematics but only what English-speaking people called shop arithmetic, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. They debated how far statistical data should inform the decisions of statesmen, and that debate prepared the British political elite for their acceptance of state financial reform under King William III. We now draw your attention to the parallel suppression of the same tradition of early statistical science in seventeenth-century France. Using shop arithmetic, Marshal Vauban proposed a reform of taxation, but King Louis XIV rejected the proposal. Not only that. The king dismissed Vauban from all his offices, and the king suppressed Vauban's book, The Royal Tenth, thus preventing any wide discussion of Vauban's suggestions. As a result, no one ever prepared the French public to understand simple statistical data or to accept financial reforms under the old regime. When John Law tried to implement other reforms during the regency which followed King Louis XIV's death, the reforms failed because of this absence of public understanding.