might be said to be the religion of all the best men of that century,
and it was natural that it should be so. The decay of a theology that
places our deepest solicitudes in a sphere beyond this, is naturally
accompanied by a transfer of these high solicitudes to a nearer scene.
But though the desire for good government, and a right sense of its
cardinal importance, were common ideas of the time in all the best heads
from Voltaire downwards, yet Turgot had a patience which in them was
universally wanting. There are two sorts of mistaken people in the
world: those who always think that something could and ought to have
been done to prevent disaster, and those who always think that nothing
could have been done. Turgot was very far removed indeed from the latter
class, but, on the other side, he was too sagacious not to know that
there are some evils of which we do well to bear a part, as the best
means of mitigating the other part. Though he respected the writings of
Rousseau and confessed his obligations to them, Turgot abhorred
declamation. He had no hope of clearing society of the intellectual and
moral debris of ages at a stroke. Nor had he abstract standards of human
bliss. The keyword to his political theory was not Pity nor Benevolence,
but Justice. 'We are sure to go wrong,' he said once, when pressed to
confer some advantage on the poor at the cost of the rich, 'the moment
we forget that _justice alone can keep the balance true among all rights
and all interests_.' Let us proceed to watch this principle actively
applied in a field where it was grievously needed.
As everybody knows, the great fiscal grievance of old France was the
_taille_, a tax raised on property and income, but only on the property
and income of the unprivileged classes. In the Limousin Turgot's
predecessor tried to substitute for the arbitrary _taille_, a tax
systematically assessed in proportion to the amount of the person's
property. Such a design involved a complete re-measurement and
re-valuation of all the land of the Generality, and this was a task of
immense magnitude and difficulty. It was very imperfectly performed, and
Turgot found the province groaning under a mass of fiscal anomalies and
disorders. Assessment, collection, exemption, were all alike conducted
without definite principles or uniform system. Besides these abuses, the
total sum demanded from the Generality by the royal government was
greatly in excess of the local resources. The district was heavily
overcharged, relatively to other districts around it. No deduction had
been made from the sum exacted by the treasury, though the falling off
in prosperity was great and notorious. Turgot computed that 'the king's
share' was as large as that of the proprietors; in other words, taxation
absorbed one half of the net products of the land. The government
listened to these representations, and conceded to the Generality about
half of the remissions that Turgot had solicited. A greater operation
was the re-adjustment of the burden, thus lightened, within the
province. The people were so irritated by the disorders which had been
introduced by the imperfect operation of the proportional _taille_, that
with the characteristic impatience of a rude and unintelligent
population, they were heedlessly crying out for a return to the more
familiar, and therefore more comfortable, disorders of the arbitrary
_taille_. Turgot, as was natural, resisted this slovenly reaction, and
applied himself with zealous industry to the immense and complex work of
effecting a complete revision and settlement of the regulations for
assessment, and, what was a more gigantic enterprise, of carrying out a
new survey and new valuation of lands and property, to serve as a true
base for the application of an equitable assessment. At the end of
thirteen years of indomitable toil the work was still unfinished,
chiefly owing to want of money for its execution. The court wasted more
in a fortnight in the easy follies of Versailles, than would have given
to the Limousin the instrument of a finished scheme of fiscal order.
Turgot's labour was not wholly thrown away. The worst abuses were
corrected, and the most crying iniquities swept away, save that iniquity
of the exemption of the privileged orders, which Turgot could not yet
venture to touch.
Let us proceed to another of the master abuses of the old system. The
introduction of the _Corvee_, in the sense in which we have to speak of
it, dates no further back than the beginning of the eighteenth century.
It was an encroachment and an innovation on the part of the bureaucracy,
and the odd circumstance has been remarked that the first mention of the
road _corvees_ in any royal Act is the famous edict of 1776, which
suppressed them. Until the Regency this famous word had described only
the services owed by dependents to their lords. It meant so many days'
labour on the lord's lands, and so many offices of domestic duty. When,
in the early part of the century, the advantages of a good system of
high-roads began to be perceived by the government, the convenient idea
came into the heads of the more ingenious among the Intendants of
imposing, for the construction of the roads, a royal or public _corvee_
analogous to that of private feudalism. Few more mischievous imposts
could have been devised.
That undying class who are contented with the shallow presumptions of _a
priori_ reasoning in economic matters, did, it is true, find specious
pleas even for the road _corvee_. There has never been an abuse in the
history of the world, for which something good could not be said. If men
earned money by labour and the use of their time, why not require from
them time and labour instead of money? By the latter device, are we not
assured against malversation of the funds? Those who substitute words
for things, and verbal plausibilities for the observation of experience,
could prolong these arguments indefinitely. The evils of the road
_corvee_, meanwhile remained patent and indisputable. In England at the
same period, it is true, the country people were obliged to give six
days in the year to the repair of the highways, under the management of
the justices of the peace. And in England the business was performed
without oppression. But then this only illustrates the unwisdom of
arguing about economic arrangements in the abstract. All depends on the
conditions by which the given arrangement is surrounded, and a practice
that in England was merely clumsy, was in France not only clumsy but a
gross cruelty. There the burden united almost all the follies and
iniquities with which a public service could be loaded. The French
peasant had to give, not six, but twelve or fifteen days of labour every
year for the construction and repair of the roads of his neighbourhood.
If he had a horse and cart, they too were pressed into the service. He
could not choose the time, and he was constantly carried away at the
moment when his own poor harvest needed his right arm and his
supervision. He received no pay, and his days on the roads were days of
hunger to himself and his family. He had the bitterness of knowing that
the advantage of the high-road was slight, indirect, and sometimes null
to himself, while it was direct and great to the town merchants and the
country gentlemen, who contributed not an hour nor a sou to the work. It
was exactly the most indigent upon whose backs this slavish load was
placed. There were a hundred abuses of spite or partiality, of
favouritism or vengeance, in the allotment of the work. The wretch was
sent to the part of the road most distant from his own house; or he was
forced to work for a longer time than fell fairly to his share; or he
saw a neighbour allowed to escape on payment of a sum of money. And at
the end of all the roads were vile. The labourers, having little heart
in work for which they had no wage, and weakened by want of food, did
badly what they had to do. There was no scientific superintendence, no
skilled direction, no system in the construction, no watchfulness as to
the maintenance. The rains of winter and the storms of summer did damage
that one man could have repaired by careful industry from day to day,
and that for lack of this one man went on increasing, until the road
fell into holes, the ditches got filled up, and deep pools of water
stood permanently in the middle of the highway. The rich disdained to
put a hand to the work; the poor, aware that they would be forced to the
hated task in the following autumn or spring, naturally attended to
their own fields, and left the roads to fall to ruin.
It need not be said that this barbarous slovenliness and disorder meant
an incredible waste of resources. It was calculated that a contractor
would have provided and maintained fine roads for little more than
one-third of the cost at which the _corvee_ furnished roads that were
execrable. Condorcet was right in comparing the government in this
matter to a senseless fellow, who indulges in all the more lavish riot,
because by paying for nothing, and getting everything at a higher price
on credit, he is never frightened into sense by being confronted with a
budget of his prodigalities.
It takes fewer words to describe Turgot's way of dealing with this
oriental mixture of extravagance, injustice, and squalor. The Intendant
of Caen had already proposed to the inhabitants of that district the
alternative plan of commuting the _corvee_ into a money payment. Turgot
adopted and perfected this great transformation. He substituted for
personal service on the roads a yearly rate, proportional in amount to
the _taille_. He instituted a systematic survey and direction of the
roads, existing or required in the Generality, and he committed the
execution of the approved plans to contractors on exact and
business-like principles. The result of this change was not merely an
immense relief to the unfortunate men who had been every year harassed
to death and half-ruined by the old method of forced labour, but so
remarkable an improvement both in the goodness and extension of the
roads, that when Arthur Young went over them five and twenty years
afterwards, he pronounced them by far the noblest public ways to be
found anywhere in France.
Two very instructive facts may be mentioned in connection with the
suppression of the _corvees_ in the Limousin. The first is that the
central government assented to the changes proposed by the young
Intendant, as promptly as if it had been a committee of the Convention,
instead of being the nominee of an absolute king. The other is that the
people in the country, when Turgot had his plans laid before them in
their parish meetings held after mass on Sundays, listened with the
keenest distrust and suspicion to what they insisted on regarding as a
sinister design for exacting more money from them. Well might Condorcet
say that very often it needs little courage to do men harm, for they
constantly suffer harm tranquilly enough; but when you take it into your
head to do them some service, then they revolt and accuse you of being
an innovator. It is fair, however, to remember how many good grounds the
French countryman had for distrusting the professions of any agent of
the government. For even in the case of this very reform, though Turgot
was able to make an addition to the _taille_ in commutation of the work
on the roads, he was not able to force a contribution, either to the
_taille_ or any other impost, from the privileged classes, the very
persons who were best able to pay. This is only an illustration of what
is now a well-known fact, that revolution was made necessary less by
despotism than by privilege on the one side, and by intense political
distrust on the other side.
Turgot was thoroughly awake to the necessity of penetrating public
opinion. The first principle of the school of Economists was an
'enlightened people.' Nothing was to be done by them; everything was to
be done for them. But they were to be trained to understand the grounds
of the measures which a central authority conceived, shaped, and carried
into practice. Rousseau was the only writer of the revolutionary school
who had the modern democratic faith in the virtue and wisdom of the
common people. Voltaire habitually spoke of their bigotry and prejudice
with the natural bitterness of a cultivated man towards the incurable
vices of ignorance. The Economists admitted Voltaire's view as true of
an existing state of things, but they looked to education, meaning by
that something more than primary instruction, to lead gradually to the
development of sound political intelligence. Hence when Turgot come into
full power as the minister of Lewis XVI., twelve years after he first
went to his obscure duties in the Limousin, he introduced the method of
prefacing his edicts by an elaborate statement of the reasons on which
their policy rested. And on the same principle he now adopted the only
means at his disposal for instructing and directing opinion. The
book-press was at that moment doing tremendous work among the classes
with education and leisure. But the newspaper press hardly existed, and
even if it had existed, however many official journals Turgot might have
had under his inspiration, the people whose minds he wished to affect
were unable to read. There was only one way of reaching them, and that
was through the priests. Religious life among the Limousins was, as we
have seen, not very pure, but it is a significant law of human nature
that the less pure a religion is, the more important in it is the place
of the priest and his office. Turgot pressed the cures into friendly
service. It is a remarkable fact, not without a parallel in other parts
of modern history, that of the two great conservative corporations of
society, the lawyers did all they could to thwart his projects, and the
priests did all they could to advance them. In truth the priests are
usually more or less sympathetic towards any form of centralised
authority; it is only when the people take their own government into
their own hands that the clergy are sure to turn cold or antipathetic
towards improvement. There is one other reservation, as Turgot found out
in 1775, when he had been transferred to a greater post, and the clergy
had joined his bitterest enemies. Then he touched the corporate spirit,
and perceived that for authority to lay a hand on ecclesiastical
privilege is to metamorphose goodwill into the most rancorous malignity.
Meanwhile, the letters in which Turgot explained his views and wishes to
the cures, by them to be imparted to their parishes, are masterpieces of
the care, the patience, the interest, of a good ruler. Those impetuous
and peremptory spirits who see in Frederick or Napoleon the only born
rulers of men, might find in these letters, and in the acts to which
they refer, the memorials of a far more admirable and beneficent type.
* * * * *
The _corvee_, vexatious as it was, yet excited less violent heats and
inflicted less misery than the abuses of military service. There had
been a militia in the country as far back as the time of the
Merovingians, but the militia-service with which Turgot had to deal only
dated from 1726. Each parish was bound to supply its quota of men to
this service, and the obligation was perhaps the most odious grievance,
though not the most really mischievous, of all that then afflicted the
realm. The hatred which it raised was due to no failure of the military
spirit in the people. From Frederick the Great downwards, everybody was
well aware that the disasters to France which had begun with the
shameful defeat of Rossbach and ended with the loss of Canada in the
west and the Indies in the east (1757-1763), were due to no want of
valour in the common soldier. It was the generals, as Napoleon said
fifty years afterwards, who were incapable and inept. And it was the
ineptitude of the administrative chiefs that made the militia at once
ineffective and abhorred. First, they allowed a great number of
classified exemptions from the ballot. The noble, the tonsured clerk,
the counsellor, the domestic of noble, tonsured clerk, and counsellor,
the eldest son of the lawyer and the farmer, the tax collector, the
schoolmaster, were all exempt. Hence the curse of service was embittered
by a sense of injustice. This was one of the many springs in the old
regime that fed the swelling and vehement stream of passion for social
equality, until at length when the day came, it made such short and
furious work with the structure of envious partition between citizen and
citizen.
Again, by a curious perversity of official pedantry, the government
insisted on each man who drew the black ticket in the abhorred lottery,
performing his service in person. It forbade substitution. Under a
modern system of universal military service, this is perfectly
intelligible and just. But, as we have seen, military service was only
made obligatory on those who were already ground down by hardships. As a
consequence of this prohibition, those who were liable to be drawn lived
in despair, and as no worse thing than the black ticket could possibly
befall them, they had every inducement to run away from their own homes
and villages. At the approach of the commissary of the government, they
fled into the woods and marshes, as if they had been pursued by the
plague. This was a signal for a civil war on a small scale. Those who
were left behind, and whose chance of being drawn was thus increased,
hastened to pursue the fugitives with such weapons as came to their
hands. In the Limousin the country was constantly the scene of murderous
disorders of this kind. What was worse, was not only that the land was
infested by vagabonds and bad characters, but that villages became half
depopulated, and the soil lost its cultivators. Finally, as is uniformly
the case in the history of bad government, an unjust method produced a
worthless machine. The _milice_ supplied as bad troops as the _corvee_
supplied bad roads. The force was recruited from the lowest class of the
population, and as soon as its members had learned a little drill, they
were discharged and their places taken by raw batches provided at random
by blind lot.
Turgot proposed that a character both of permanence and locality should
be given to the provincial force; that each parish or union of parishes
should be required to raise a number of men; that these men should be
left at home and in their own districts, and only called out for
exercise for a certain time each year; and that they should be retained
as a reserve force by a small payment. In this way, he argued that the
government would secure a competent force, and by stimulating local
pride and point of honour would make service popular instead of hateful.
As the government was too weak and distracted to take up so important a
scheme as this, Turgot was obliged to content himself with evading the
existing regulations; and it is a curious illustration of the pliancy of
Versailles, that he should have been allowed to do so openly and without
official remonstrance. He permitted the victim of the ballot to provide
a voluntary substitute, and he permitted the parish to tempt
substitutes by payment of a sum of money on enrolment. This may seem a
very obvious course to follow; but no one who has tried to realise the
strength and obstinacy of routine, will measure the service of a
reformer by the originality of his ideas. In affairs of government, the
priceless qualities are not merely originality of resource, but a sense
for things that are going wrong, and a sufficiently vigorous will to set
them right.
One general expression serves to describe this most important group of
Turgot's undertakings. The reader has probably already observed that
what Turgot was doing, was to take that step which is one of the most
decisive in the advance of a society to a highly organised industrial
stage. He displaced imposts in kind, that rudest and most wasteful form
of contribution to the public service, and established in their stead a
system of money payments, and of having the work of the government done
on commercial principles. Thus, as if it were not enough to tear the
peasant away from the soil to serve in the militia, as if it were not
enough to drag away the farmer and his cattle to the public highways,
the reigning system struck a third blow at agriculture by requiring the
people of the localities that happened to be traversed by a regiment on
the march, to supply their waggons and horses and oxen for the purposes
of military transport. In this case, it is true, a certain compensation
in money was allowed, but how inadequate was this insignificant
allowance, we may easily understand. The payment was only for one day,
but the day's march was often of many miles, and the oxen, which in the
Limousin mostly did the work of horses, were constantly seen to drop
down dead in the roads. There was not only the one day's work. Often
two, three, or five days were needed to reach the place of appointment,
and for these days not even the paltry twenty sous were granted. Nor
could any payment of this kind recompense the peasant for the absence of
his beasts of burden on the great days when he wanted to plough his
fields, to carry the grain to the barns, or to take his produce to
market. The obvious remedy here, as in the _corvees_ was to have the
transport effected by a contractor, and to pay him out of a rate levied
on the persons liable. This was what Turgot ordered to be done.
Of one other burden of the same species he relieved the cultivator. This
unfortunate being was liable to be called upon to collect, as well as to
pay, the taxes. Once nominated, he became responsible for the amount at
which his commune was assessed. If he did not produce the sum, he lost
his liberty. If he advanced it from his own pocket, he lost at least the
interest on the money. In collecting the money from his fellow
taxpayers, he not only incurred bitter and incessant animosities, but,
what was harder to bear, he lost the priceless time of which his own
land was only too sorely in need. In the Limousin the luckless creature
had a special disadvantage, for here the collector of the _taille_ had
also to collect the twentieths, and the twentieths were a tax for which
even the privileged classes were liable. They, as might be supposed,
cavilled, disputed, and appealed. The appeal lay to a sort of county
board, which was composed of people of their own kind, and before which
they too easily made out a plausible case against a clumsy collector,
who more often than not knew neither how to read nor to write. Turgot's
reform of a system which was always harassing and often ruinous to an
innocent individual, consisted in the creation of the task of collection
into a distinct and permanent office, exercised over districts
sufficiently large to make the poundage, out of which the collectors
were paid, an inducement to persons of intelligence and spirit to
undertake the office as a profession. However moderate and easy each of
these reforms may seem by itself, yet any one may see how the sum of
them added to the prosperity of the land, increased the efficiency of
the public service, and tended to lessen the grinding sense of injustice
among the common people.