mind? How trace the road, now overgrown and half-hidden, along which the
race has travelled? Two ideas suggest themselves, which lay foundations
for this inquiry. For one thing, the resources of nature and the
fruitful germ of all sorts of knowledge are to be found wherever men are
to be found. 'The sublimest attainments are not, and cannot be, other
than the first ideas of sense developed or combined, just as the edifice
whose height most amazes the eye, of necessity reposes on the very earth
that we tread; and the same senses, the same organs, the spectacle of
the same universe, have everywhere given men the same ideas, as the same
needs and the same dispositions have everywhere taught them the same
arts.' Or it might be put in other words. There is identity in human
nature, and repetition in surrounding circumstance means the
reproduction of social consequences. For another thing, 'the actual
state of the universe, by presenting at the same moment on the earth all
the shades of barbarism and civilisation, discloses to us as in a single
glance the monuments, the footprints of all the steps of the human mind,
the measure of the whole track along which it has passed, the history of
all the ages.'
The progress of the human mind means to Turgot the progress of
knowledge. Its history is the history of the growth and spread of
science and the arts. Its advance is increased enlightenment of the
understanding. From Adam and Eve down to Lewis the Fourteenth, the
record of progress is the chronicle of the ever-increasing additions to
the sum of what men know, and the accuracy and fulness with which they
know. The chief instrument in this enlightenment is the rising up from
time to time of some lofty and superior intelligence; for though human
character contains everywhere the same principle, yet certain minds are
endowed with a peculiar abundance of talent that is refused to others.
'Circumstances develop these superior talents, or leave them buried in
obscurity; and from the infinite variety of these circumstances springs
the inequality among nations.' The agricultural stage goes immediately
before a decisively polished state, because it is then first that there
is that surplus of means of subsistence, which allows men of higher
capacity the leisure for using it in the acquisition of knowledge,
properly so called.
One of the greatest steps was the precious invention of writing, and one
of the most rapid was the constitution of mathematical knowledge. The
sciences that came next matured more slowly, because in mathematics the
explorer has only to compare ideas among one another, while in the
others he has to test the conformity of ideas to objective facts.
Mathematical truths, becoming more numerous every day, and increasingly
fruitful in proportion, lead to the development of hypotheses at once
more extensive and more exact, and point to new experiments, which in
their turn furnish new problems to solve. 'So necessity perfects the
instrument; so mathematics finds support in physics, to which it lends
its lamp; so all knowledge is bound together; so, notwithstanding the
diversity of their advance, all the sciences lend one another mutual
aid; and so, by force of feeling a way, of multiplying systems, of
exhausting errors, so to speak, the world at length arrives at the
knowledge of a vast number of truths.' It might seem as if a prodigious
confusion, as of tongues, would arise from so enormous an advance along
so many lines. 'The different sciences, originally confined within a few
simple notions common to all, can now, after their advance into more
extensive and difficult ideas, only be surveyed apart. But an advance,
greater still, brings them together again, because that mutual
dependence of all truths is discovered, which, while it links them one
to another, throws light on one by another.'
Alas, the history of opinion is, in one of its most extensive branches,
the history of error. The senses are the single source of our ideas, and
furnish its models to the imagination. Hence that nearly incorrigible
disposition to judge what we are ignorant of by what we know; hence
those deceptive analogies to which the primitive rudeness of men
surrenders itself. '_As they watched nature, as their eyes wandered to
the surface of a profound ocean, instead of the far-off bed hidden under
the waters, they saw nothing but their own likeness._ Every object in
nature had its god, and this god formed after the pattern of men, had
men's attributes and men's vices.'[41] Here, in anthropomorphism, or the
transfer of human quality to things not human, and the invention of
spiritual existences to be the recipients of this quality, Turgot justly
touched the root of most of the wrong thinking that has been as a
manacle to science.
[Footnote 41: P. 601.]
His admiration for those epochs in which new truths were most
successfully discovered, and old fallacies most signally routed, did not
prevent Turgot from appreciating the ages of criticism and their
services to knowledge. He does full justice to Alexandria, not only for
its astronomy and geometry, but for that peculiar studiousness 'which
exercises itself less on things than on books; whose strength lies less
in producing and discovering, than in collecting and comparing and
estimating what has been produced and discovered; which does not press
forward, but gazes backward along the road that has already been
traversed. The studies that require most genius, are not always those
which imply most progress in the mass of men. There are minds to which
nature has given a memory capable of comparing truths, of suggesting an
arrangement that places these truths in the fullest light; but to which,
at the same time, she has refused that ardour of genius which insists on
inventing and opening out for itself new lines of discovery. Made to
unite former discoveries under a single point of view, to surround them
with light, and to exhibit them in entire perfection, if they are not
luminaries that burn and sparkle of themselves, at least they are like
diamonds that reflect with dazzling brilliance a borrowed light.'
Thus Turgot's conception of progress regards it mainly, if not entirely,
as a gradual dawn and diffusion of light, the spreading abroad of the
rays of knowledge. He does not assert, as some moderns have crudely
asserted, that morality is of the nature of a fixed quantity; still he
hints something of the kind. 'Morality,' he says, speaking of Greece in
the time of its early physical speculation, 'though still imperfect,
still kept fewer relics of the infancy of reason. Those everspringing
necessities which so incessantly recall man to society, and force him to
bend to its laws, that instinct, that sentiment of what is good and
right, which Providence has engraved in all hearts, and which precedes
reason, all lead the thinkers of every time back to the same fundamental
principles of the science of morals.'
We meet with this limitation of the idea of progress in every member of
the school to which, more than to any other, Turgot belonged. Even in
the vindication of the claims of Christianity to the gratitude of
mankind, he had forborne from laying stress on any original
contribution, supposed to be made by that religion to the precious stock
of ethical ideas. He dwells upon the 'tender zeal for the progress of
truth that the Christian religion inspired,' and recounts the various
circumstances in which it spread and promoted the social and political
conditions most favourable to intellectual or scientific activity.
Whatever may be the truth or the value of Christianity as a dogmatic
system, there can be little doubt that its weight as a historic force is
to be looked for, not so much in the encouragement it gave to science
and learning, in respect of which Western Europe probably owes more to
Mahometanism, as in the high and generous types of character which it
inspired. A man of rare moral depth, warmth, or delicacy, may be a more
important element in the advance of civilisation, than the newest and
truest deduction from what Turgot calls 'the fundamental principles of
the science of morals.' The leading of souls to do what is right and
humane, is always more urgent than mere instruction of the intelligence
as to what exactly is the right and the humane. The saint after all has
a place in positive history; but the men of the eighteenth century
passionately threw him out from their calendar, as the mere wooden idol
of superstition. They eagerly recognised the genius of scientific
discovery; but they had no eyes for the genius of moral holiness.
Turgot, far as he was from many of the narrownesses of his time, yet did
not entirely transcend this, the worst of them all. And because he could
not perceive there to be any new growths in moral science, he left out
from a front place among the forces that have given strength and
ripeness to the human mind, the superior capacity of some men for
kindling, by word and example, the glowing love and devout practice of
morality in the breasts of many generations of their fellows.
The mechanical arts, Turgot says, were preserved in the dark ages by the
necessities of existence, and because 'it is impossible but that out of
the crowd of artisans practising them, there should arise from time to
time one of those men of genius who are found mingled with other men, as
gold is found mingled with the earth of a mine.' Surely in the same way
holy men arose, with keener feeling for the spiritual necessities of the
time, and finer knowledge to train and fit the capacities of human
nature to meet these needs, and make their satisfaction the basis for
yet loftier standards and holier aspirations and nobler and more careful
practice. The work of all such men deserved a place in an outline of the
progressive forces of the human mind, as much as the work of those who
invented bills of exchange, the art of musical notation, windmills,
clocks, gunpowder, and all the other material instruments for
multiplying the powers of man and the conveniences of life.
Even if we give Turgot the benefit of the doubt whether he intended to
describe more than the progress of the human intelligence, or the
knowing part of the mind, the omission of the whole moral side is still
a defect. For as he interprets knowledge to be the conformity of our
ideas to facts, has there not been a clearly recognisable progress in
the improved conformity of our ideas to the most momentous facts of all,
the various circumstances of human action, its motives and
consequences? No factor among the constituents of a progressive
civilisation deserves more carefully to be taken into account, than the
degree in which the current opinion and usage of a society recognise the
comprehensiveness of moral obligation. More than upon anything else,
does progress depend on the kinds of conduct which a community
classifies as moral or immoral, and upon the wider or narrower
inclusiveness within rigid ethical boundaries of what ought or ought not
to be left open and indifferent. The conditions which create and modify
these ethical regulations,--their law in a word,--form a department of
the history of the human mind, which can be almost less readily
dispensed with than any other. What sort of a history of Europe would
that be, which should omit, for example, to consider the influence of
the moral rigour of Calvinism upon the growth of the nations affected by
it?
Moreover, Turgot expressly admits the ever-present wants of society to
be the stimulating agents, as well as the guides, of scientific energy.
He expressly admits, too, that they are constantly plucking men by the
skirt, and forcing them back to social rules of conduct. It is certain,
therefore, that as the necessities of society increase in number and
complexity, morality will be developed to correspond with them, and the
way in which new applications of ethical sentiments to the demands of
the common weal are made, is as interesting and as deserving of a place
in any scientific inquiry into social progress, as the new applications
of physical truths to satisfy material needs and to further material
convenience. Turgot justly points to the perfecting of language as one
of the most important of the many processes that go to the general
advancement of the race.[42] Not less, but more, important is the
analogous work of perfecting our ideas of virtue and duty. Surely this
chamber, too, in the great laboratory deserves that the historian should
unseal its door and explore its recesses.
[Footnote 42: P. 603.]
The characteristic merits of the second of the two discourses at the
Sorbonne may be briefly described in this way. It recognises the idea of
ordered succession in connection with the facts of society. It considers
this succession as one, not of superficial events, but of working
forces. Thus Bolingbroke, writing fifteen years before, had said that
'as to events that stand recorded in history, we see them all, we see
them as they followed one another, or as they produced one another,
causes or effects, immediate or remote.'[43] But it is very evident from
his illustrations that by all this he understood no more than the
immediate connection between one transaction and another. He thought,
for example, of the Revolution of 1688 being a consequence of the bad
government of James the Second; of this bad government springing from
the king's attachment to popery; this in turn being caused by the exile
of the royal family; this exile having its source in Cromwell's
usurpation; and so forth, one may suppose, down to the Noachian flood,
or the era when the earth was formless and void. It is mere futility to
talk of cause and effect in connection with a string of arbitrarily
chosen incidents of this sort. Cause and effect, in Turgot's sense of
history, describe a relation between certain sets or groups of
circumstances, that are of a peculiarly decisive kind, because the
surface of events conforms itself to their inner working. His account of
these deciding circumstances was not what we should be likely to accept
now, because he limited them too closely to purely intellectual
acquisitions, as we have just seen, and because he failed to see the
necessity of tracing the root of the whole growth to certain principles
in the mental constitution of mankind. But, at all events, his
conception of history rose above merely individual concerns, embraced
the successive movements of societies and their relations to one
another, and sought the spring of revolutions in the affairs of a
community in long trains of preparing conditions, internal and external.
Above all, history was a whole. The fortunes and achievements of each
nation were scrutinised for their effect on the growth of all mankind.
[Footnote 43: _Study of History_, Letter ii.]
IV.
In the year 1761, Turgot, then in his thirty-fourth year, was appointed
to the office of Intendant in the Generality of Limoges. There were
three different divisions of France in the eighteenth century: first and
oldest, the diocese or ecclesiastical circumscription; second, the
province or military government; and third, the Generality, or a
district defined for fiscal and administrative purposes. The Intendant
in the government of the last century was very much what the Prefect is
in the government of our own time. Perhaps, however, we understand
Turgot's position in Limousin best, by comparing it to that of the Chief
Commissioner of some great district in our Indian Empire. For example,
the first task which Turgot had to perform was to execute a new
land-assessment for purposes of imperial revenue. He had to construct
roads, to build barracks, to administer justice, to deal with a famine,
just as the English civilian has to do in Orissa or Behar. Much of his
time was taken up in elaborate memorials to the central government, and
the desk of the controller-general at Versailles was loaded with minutes
and reports exactly like the voluminous papers which fill the mahogany
boxes of the Members of Council and the Home Secretary at Calcutta. The
fundamental conditions of the two systems of government were much alike;
absolute political authority, and an elaborately centralised civil
administration for keeping order and raising a revenue. The direct
authority of an Intendant was not considerable. His chief functions were
the settlement of detail in executing the general orders that he
received from the minister; a provisional decision on certain kinds of
minor affairs; and a power of judging some civil suits, subject to
appeal to the Council. But though the Intendant was so strictly a
subordinate, yet he was the man of the government, and thoroughly in its
confidence. The government only saw with his eyes, and only acted on the
faith of his reports, memorials, and requisitions; and this in a country
where the government united in itself all forms of power, and was
obliged to be incessantly active and to make itself felt at every point.
Of all the thirty-two great districts in which the authority of the
Intendant stood between the common people and the authority of the
minister at Versailles, the Generality of Limoges was the poorest, the
rudest, the most backward, and the most miserable. To the eye of the
traveller with a mind for the picturesque, there were parts of this
central region of France whose smiling undulations, delicious
water-scenes, deep glens extending into amphitheatres, and slopes hung
with woods of chestnut, all seemed to make a lovelier picture than the
cheerful beauty of prosperous Normandy, or the olive-groves and
orange-gardens of Provence. Arthur Young thought the Limousin the most
beautiful part of France. Unhappily for the cultivator, these gracious
conformations belonged to a harsh and churlish soil. For him the roll of
the chalk and the massing of the granite would have been well exchanged
for the fat loams of level Picardy. The soil of the Limousin was
declared by its inhabitants to be the most ungrateful in the whole
kingdom, returning no more than four net for one of seed sown, while
there was land in the vale of the Garonne that returned thirty-fold. The
two conditions for raising tolerable crops were abundance of labour and
abundance of manure. But misery drove the men away, and the stock were
sold to pay the taxes. So the land lacked both the arms of the tiller,
and the dressing whose generous chemistry would have transmuted the dull
earth into fruitfulness and plenty. The extent of the district was
estimated at a million and a half of hectares, equivalent to nearly four
millions of English acres: yet the population of this vast tract was
only five hundred thousand souls. Even to-day it is not more than eight
hundred thousand.
The common food of the people was the chestnut, and to the great
majority of them even the coarsest rye-bread was a luxury that they had
never tasted. Maise and buckwheat were their chief cereals, and these,
together with a coarse radish, took up hundreds of acres that might
under a happier system have produced fine wheat and nourished
fruit-trees. There had once been a certain export of cattle, but that
had now come to an end, partly because the general decline of the
district had impaired the quality of the beasts, and partly because the
Parisian butchers, who were by much the greatest customers, had found
the markets of Normandy more convenient. The more the trade went down,
the heavier was the burden of the cattle-tax on the stock that remained.
The stock-dealer was thus ruined from both sides at once. In the same
way, the Limousin horses, whose breed had been famous all over France,
had ceased to be an object of commerce, and the progressive increase of
taxation had gradually extinguished the trade. Angoumois, which formed
part of the Generality of Limoges, had previously boasted of producing
the best and finest paper in the world, and it had found a market not
only throughout France, but all over Europe. There had been a time when
this manufacture supported sixty mills; at the death of Lewis XIV. their
number had fallen from sixty to sixteen. An excise duty at the mill, a
duty on exportation at the provincial frontier, a duty on the
importation of rags over the provincial frontier,--all these vexations
had succeeded in reducing the trade with Holland, one of France's best
customers, to one-fourth of its previous dimensions. Nor were paper and
cattle the only branches of trade that had been blighted by fiscal
perversity. The same burden arrested the transport of saffron across the
borders of the province, on its way to Hungary and Prussia and the other
cold lands where saffron was a favourite condiment. Salt which came up
the Charente from the marshes by the coast, was stripped of all its
profit, first by the duty paid on crossing from the Limousin to Perigord
and Auvergne, and next by the right possessed by certain of the great
lords on the banks of the Charente to help themselves at one point and
another to portions of the cargo. Iron was subject to a harassing excise
in all those parts of the country that were beyond the jurisdiction of
the parlement of Bordeaux. The effect of such positive hindrances as
these to the transit of goods was further aided, to the destruction of
trade, by the absence of roads. There were four roads in the province,
but all of them so bad that the traveller knew not whether to curse more
lustily the rocks or the swamps that interrupted his journey
alternately. There were two rivers, the Vienne and the Vezere, and these
might seem to an enthusiast for the famous argument from Design, as if
Nature had intended them for the transport of timber from the immense
forests that crowned the Limousin hills. Unluckily, their beds were so
thickly bestrewn with rock that neither of them was navigable for any
considerable part of its long course through the ill-starred province.
The inhabitants were as cheerless as the land on which they lived. They
had none of the fiery energy, the eloquence, the mobility of the people
of the south. Still less were they endowed with the apt intelligence,
the ease, the social amiability, the openness, of their neighbours on
the north. 'The dwellers in Upper Limousin,' said one who knew them,
'are coarse and heavy, jealous, distrustful, avaricious.' The dwellers
in Lower Limousin had a less repulsive address, but they were at least
as narrowly self-interested at heart, and they added a capacity for
tenacious and vindictive hatred. The Limousins had the superstitious
doctrines of other semi-barbarous populations, and they had their vices.
They passed abruptly and without remorse from a penitential procession
to the tavern and the brothel. Their Christianity was as superficial as
that of the peasant of the Eifel in our own day, or of the Finnish
converts of whom we are told that they are even now not beyond
sacrificing a foal in honour of the Virgin Mary. Saint Martial and Saint
Leonard were the patron saints of the country, and were the objects of
an adoration in comparison with which the other saints, and even God
himself, were thrust into a secondary place.
In short, the people of the Generality of Limoges represented the most
unattractive type of peasantry. They were deeply superstitious, violent
in their prejudices, obstinate withstanders of all novelty, rude, dull,
stupid, perverse, and hardly redeeming a narrow and blinding
covetousness by a stubborn and mechanical industry. Their country has
been fixed upon as the cradle of Celtic nationality in France, and there
are some who believe that here the old Gaulish blood kept itself purer
from external admixture than was the case anywhere else in the land. In
our own day, when an orator has occasion to pay a compliment to the
townsmen of Limoges, he says that the genius of the people of the
district has ever been faithful to its source; it has ever held the
balance true between the Frank tradition of the north, and the Roman
tradition of the south. This makes an excellent period for a
rhetorician, but the fact which it conveys made Limousin all the severer
a task for an administrator. Almost immediately after his appointment,
Turgot had the chance of being removed to Rouen, and after that to
Lyons. Either of these promotions would have had the advantages of a
considerable increase of income, less laborious duties, and a much more
agreeable residence. Turgot, with a high sense of duty that probably
seemed quixotic enough to the Controller-General, declined the
preferment, on the very ground of the difficulty and importance of the
task that he had already undertaken. '_Poor peasants, poor kingdom!_'
had been Quesnay's constant exclamation, and it had sunk deep into the
spirit of his disciple. He could have little thought of high salary or
personal ease, when he discerned an opportunity of improving the hard
lot of the peasant, and softening the misfortunes of the realm.