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+Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3), by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3)
+       Turgot
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: October 3, 2007 [EBook #22865]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TURGOT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, René Anderson Benitz and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CRITICAL MISCELLANIES
+
+
+by
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+
+VOL. II.
+
+Essay 2: Turgot
+
+
+
+
+
+
+London
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+New York: The MacMillan Company
+1905
+
+
+
+
+TURGOT.
+
+
+I.
+                                                         PAGE
+
+Birth and family descent                                  41
+
+His youth at the Sorbonne                                 47
+
+Intellectual training                                     52
+
+His college friends: Morellet, and Loménie de Brienne     54
+
+Turgot refused to become an ecclesiastic                  56
+
+His revolt against dominant sophisms of the time          60
+
+Letter to Buffon                                          61
+
+Precocity of his intellect                                65
+
+Letter to Madame de Graffigny                             65
+
+Illustrates the influence of Locke                        69
+
+Views on marriage                                         72
+
+On the controversy opened by Rousseau                     72
+
+Turgot's power of grave suspense                          76
+
+
+II.
+
+First Discourse at the Sorbonne                           78
+
+Analysis of its contents                                  80
+
+Criticisms upon it                                        86
+
+It is one-sided                                           87
+
+And not truly historic                                    88
+
+Fails to distinguish doctrine from organisation           89
+
+Omits the Christianity of the East                        90
+
+And economic conditions                                   92
+
+The contemporary position of the Church in Europe         93
+
+
+III.
+
+Second Discourse at the Sorbonne                          96
+
+Its pregnant thesis of social causation                   97
+
+Compared with the thesis of Bossuet                       99
+
+And of Montesquieu                                       100
+
+Analysis of the Second Discourse                         102
+
+Characteristic of Turgot's idea of Progress              106
+
+Its limitation                                           108
+
+Great merit of the Discourse, that it recognises
+ordered succession                                       110
+
+
+IV.
+
+Turgot appointed Intendant of the Limousin               111
+
+Functions of an Intendant                                112
+
+Account of the Limousin                                  114
+
+Turgot's passion for good government                     118
+
+He attempts to deal with the _Taille_                      119
+
+The road _Corvée_                                          121
+
+Turgot's endeavours to enlighten opinion                 126
+
+Military service                                         129
+
+   "     transport                                       131
+
+The collection of taxes                                  132
+
+Turgot's private benevolence                             133
+
+Introduces the potato                                    134
+
+Founds an academy                                        135
+
+Encourages manufacturing industry                        136
+
+Enlightened views on Usury                               137
+
+Has to deal with a scarcity                              138
+
+His plans                                                139
+
+Instructive facts connected with this famine             142
+
+Turgot's Reflections on the Formation and
+Distribution of Wealth                                   149
+
+
+V.
+
+Turgot made Controller-General                           150
+
+His reforms                                              151
+
+Their reception                                          153
+
+His unpopularity                                         156
+
+Difficulties with the king                               157
+
+His dismissal                                            158
+
+His pursuits in retirement                               159
+
+Conclusion                                               162
+
+
+
+
+TURGOT.
+
+I.
+
+
+Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot was born in Paris on the 10th of May 1727. He
+died in 1781. His life covered rather more than half a century,
+extending, if we may put it a little roughly, over the middle fifty
+years of the eighteenth century. This middle period marks the exact date
+of the decisive and immediate preparation for the Revolution. At its
+beginning neither the intellectual nor the social elements of the great
+disruption had distinctly appeared, or commenced their fermentation. At
+its close their work was completed, and we may count the months thence
+until the overthrow of every institution in France. It was between 1727
+and 1781 that the true revolution took place. The events from '89 were
+only finishing strokes, the final explosion of a fabric under which
+every yard had been mined, by the long endeavour for half a century of
+an army of destroyers deliberate and involuntary, direct and oblique,
+such as the world has never at any other time beheld.
+
+In 1727 Voltaire was returning from his exile in England, to open the
+long campaign, of which he was from that time forth to the close of his
+days the brilliant and indomitable captain. He died in 1778, bright,
+resolute, humane, energetic, to the last. Thus Turgot's life was almost
+exactly contemporary with the pregnant era of Voltaire's activity. In
+the same spring in which Turgot died, Maurepas too came to his end, and
+Necker was dismissed. The last event was the signal at which the floods
+of the deluge fairly began to rise, and the revolutionary tide to swell.
+
+It will be observed, moreover, that Turgot was born half a generation
+after the first race of the speculative revolutionists. Rousseau,
+Diderot, Helvétius, Condillac, D'Alembert, as well as the foreign Hume,
+so much the greatest of the whole band of innovators, because
+penetrating so much nearer to the depths, all came into the world which
+they were to confuse so unspeakably, in the half dozen years between
+1711 and 1717. Turgot was of later stock and comes midway between these
+fathers of the new church, between Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, and the
+generation of its fiery practical apostles, Condorcet, Mirabeau,
+Robespierre.[1] The only other illustrious European of this decade was
+Adam Smith, who was born in 1723, and between whose labours and some of
+the most remarkable of Turgot's there was so much community. We cannot
+tell how far the gulf between Turgot and the earlier band was fixed by
+the accident that he did not belong to their generation in point of
+time. The accident is in itself only worth calling attention to, in
+connection with his distance from them in other and more important
+points than time.
+
+[Footnote 1: Born in 1743, 1749, and 1759 respectively.]
+
+The years of Turgot exactly bridge the interval between the ministry of
+the infamous Dubois and the ministry of the inglorious Calonne; between
+the despair and confusion of the close of the regency, and the despair
+and confusion of the last ten years of the monarchy. In 1727 we stand on
+the threshold of that far-resounding fiery workshop, where a hundred
+hands wrought the cunning implements and Cyclopean engines that were to
+serve in storming the hated citadels of superstition and injustice. In
+1781 we emerge from these subterranean realms into the open air, to find
+ourselves surrounded by all the sounds and portents of imminent ruin.
+This, then, is the significance of the date of Turgot's birth.
+
+       *     *     *     *     *
+
+His stock was Norman, and those who amuse themselves by finding a vital
+condition of the highest ability in antiquity of blood, may quote the
+descent of Turgot in support of their delusion. His biographers speak of
+one Togut, a Danish Prince, who walked the earth some thousand years
+before the Christian era; and of Saint Turgot in the eleventh century,
+the Prior of Durham, biographer of Bede, and first minister of Malcolm
+III. of Scotland. We shall do well not to linger in this too dark and
+frigid air. Let us pass over Togut and Saint Turgot; and the founder of
+a hospital in the thirteenth century; and the great-great-grandfather
+who sat as president of the Norman nobles in the States-General of 1614,
+and the grandfather who deserted arms for the toga. History is hardly
+concerned in this solemn marshalling of shades.
+
+Even with Michel-Etienne, the father of Turgot, we have here no dealing.
+Let it suffice to say that he held high municipal office in Paris, and
+performed its duties with exceptional honour and spirit, giving
+sumptuous fêtes, constructing useful public works, and on one occasion
+jeoparding his life with a fine intrepidity that did not fail in his
+son, in appeasing a bloody struggle between two bodies of Swiss and
+French guards. There is in the library of the British Museum a folio of
+1740, containing elaborate plates and letterpress, descriptive of the
+fêtes celebrated by the city of Paris with Michel-Etienne Turgot as its
+chief officer, on the occasion of the marriage of Louise-Elizabeth of
+France to Don Philip of Spain (August 1739). As one contemplates these
+courtly sumptuosities, La Bruyère's famous picture recurs to the mind,
+of far other scenes in the same gay land. 'We see certain wild animals,
+male and female, scattered over the fields, black, livid, all burnt by
+the sun, bound to the earth that they dig and work with unconquerable
+pertinacity; they have a sort of articulate voice, and when they rise on
+their feet, they show a human face; in fact they are men.' That these
+violent and humiliating contrasts are eternal and inevitable, is the
+last word of the dominant philosophy of society; and one of the reasons
+why Turgot's life is worth studying, is that he felt in so pre-eminent
+a degree the urgency of lightening the destiny of that livid, wild,
+hardly articulate, ever-toiling multitude.
+
+The sum of the genealogical page is that Turgot inherited that position
+which, falling to worthy souls, is of its nature so invaluable, a family
+tradition of exalted courage and generous public spirit. There have been
+noble and patriotic men who lacked this inheritance, but we may be sure
+that even these would have fought the battle at greater advantage, if a
+magnanimous preference for the larger interests had come to them as a
+matter of instinctive prejudice, instead of being acquired as a matter
+of reason. The question of titular aristocracy is not touched by this
+consideration, for titular aristocracies postpone the larger interests
+to the narrow interests of their order. And Turgot's family was only of
+the secondary noblesse of the robe.
+
+Turgot was the third son of his father. As the employments which persons
+of respectable family could enter were definite and stereotyped, there
+was little room for debate as to the calling for which a youth should
+prepare himself. Arms, civil administration, and the church, furnished
+the only three openings for a gentleman. The effects of this rigorous
+adherence to artificial and exclusive rules of caste were manifestly
+injurious to society, as such caste rules always are after a society has
+passed beyond a certain stage. To identify the interests of the richest
+and most powerful class with the interests of the church, of the army,
+and of a given system of civil government, was indeed to give to that
+class the strongest motives for leaving the existing social order
+undisturbed. It unfortunately went too far in this direction, by
+fostering the strongest possible motives of hostility to such
+modifications in these gigantic departments as changing circumstances
+might make needful, in the breasts of the only men who could produce
+these modifications without a violent organic revolution. Such a system
+left too little course to spontaneity, and its curse is the curse of
+French genius. Some of its evil effects were obvious and on the surface.
+The man who should have been a soldier found himself saying mass and
+hearing confessions. Vauvenargues, who was born for diplomacy or
+literature, passed the flower of his days in the organised dreariness of
+garrisons and marches. In our own day communities and men who lead them
+have still to learn that no waste is so profuse and immeasurable, even
+from the material point of view, as that of intellectual energy,
+checked, uncultivated, ignored, or left without its opportunity. In
+France, until a very short time before the Revolution, we can hardly
+point to a single recognised usage which did not augment this waste. The
+eldest son usually preserved the rank and status of the family, whether
+civil or military. Turgot's eldest brother was to devote himself to
+civil administration, the next to be a soldier, and Turgot himself to be
+an ecclesiastic.
+
+The second of the brothers, who began by following arms, had as little
+taste for them as the future minister had for the church. It is rather
+remarkable that he seems to have had the same passion for
+administration, and he persuaded the government after the loss of Canada
+that Guiana, to be called Equinoctial France, would if well governed
+become some sort of equivalent for the northern possession. He was made
+Governor-general, but he had forgotten to take the climate into account,
+and the scheme came to an abortive end, involving him in a mass of
+confused quarrels which lasted some years. He had a marked love for
+botany, agriculture, and the like; was one of the founders of the
+Society of Agriculture in 1760; and was the author of various pieces on
+points of natural history.[2]
+
+[Footnote 2: Among others, of a little volume still to be met with in
+libraries, _Sur la manière de préparer les diverses curiosités
+d'histoire naturelle_ (1758).]
+
+Turgot went as a boarder first to the college of Louis-le-Grand, then to
+that of Plessis; thence to the seminary of Saint Sulpice, where he took
+the degree of bachelor in theology; and from Saint Sulpice to the
+Sorbonne. His childhood and youth, like that of other men who have
+afterwards won love and admiration, have their stories. The affection of
+one biographer records how the pocket-money with which the young Turgot
+was furnished, used always instantly to disappear, no one knew how nor
+on what. It was discovered that he gave it to poor schoolfellows to
+enable them to buy books. Condorcet justly remarks on this trait, that
+'goodness and even generosity are not rare sentiments in childhood; but
+for these sentiments to be guided by such wisdom, this really seems the
+presage of an extraordinary man, all whose sentiments should be virtues,
+because they would always be controlled by reason.'[3] It is at any rate
+certain that the union of profound benevolence with judgment, which this
+story prefigures, was the supreme distinction of Turgot's character. It
+is less pleasant to learn that Turgot throughout his childhood was
+always repulsed by his mother, who deemed him sullen, because he failed
+to make his bow with good grace, and was shy and taciturn. He fled from
+her visitors, and would hide himself behind sofa or screen; until
+dragged forth for social inspection.[4] This is only worth recording,
+because the same external awkwardness and lack of grace remained with
+Turgot to the end, and had something to do with the unpopularity that
+caused his fall. Perhaps he was thinking of his own childhood, when he
+wrote that fathers are often indifferent, or incessantly occupied with
+the details of business, and that he had seen the very parents who
+taught their children that there is nothing so noble as to make people
+happy, yet repulse the same children when urging some one's claim to
+charity or favour, and intimidate their young sensibility, instead of
+encouraging and training it.[5]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Vie de Turgot_, p. 8 (ed. 1847).]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Mémoires de Morellet_, i. 12 (ed. 1822).]
+
+[Footnote 5: Lettre à Madame de Graffigny. _OEuv._ ii. 793.]
+
+Morellet, one of the best known of the little group of friends and
+brother students at the Sorbonne, has recorded other authentic traits.
+Turgot, he says, united the simplicity of a child to a peculiar dignity
+that forced the respect of his comrades. His modesty and reserve were
+those of a girl, and those equivocal references in which the
+undisciplined animalism of youth often has a stealthy satisfaction,
+always called the blood to his cheeks and covered him with
+embarrassment. For all that, his spirit was full of a frank gaiety, and
+he would indulge in long bursts of laughter at a pleasantry or frolic
+that struck him. We may be glad to know this, because without express
+testimony to the contrary, there would have been some reason for
+suspecting that Turgot was defective in that most wholesome and human
+quality of a capacity for laughter.
+
+The sensitive purity which Morellet notices, not without slight lifting
+of the eyebrow, remained with Turgot throughout his life. This was the
+more remarkable from the prevailing laxity of opinion upon this
+particular subject, perhaps the worst blemish upon the feeling and
+intelligence of the revolutionary schools. For it was not merely
+libertines, like Marmontel, making a plea for their own dissoluteness,
+who habitually spoke of these things with inconsiderate levity. Grave
+men of blameless life, like Condorcet, deliberately argued in favour of
+leaving a loose rein to the mutual inclinations of men and women, and
+laughed at the time 'wasted in quenching the darts of the flesh.'[6] It
+is true that at D'Holbach's house, the headquarters of the dogmatic
+atheism in which the irreligious reaction culminated, this was the only
+theme on which freedom of speech was sometimes curtailed. But the fact
+that such a restriction should have been noticed, suggests that it was
+exceptional.[7] One good effect followed, let us admit. The virtuousness
+of continence was not treated as a superstition by those who vindicated
+it as Turgot did, but discussed like any other virtue; and was defended
+not as an intuition of faith, but as a reasoned conclusion of the
+judgment. It was permitted to occupy no solitary and mysterious throne,
+apart and away from other conditions and parts of human excellence and
+social wellbeing. There is intrinsically no harm in any virtue being
+accepted in the firm shape of a simple prejudice. On the contrary, there
+is a multitude of practical advantages in such a consolidated and
+spontaneously working order. But in considering conduct and character,
+and forming an opinion upon infractions of a virtue, we cannot be just
+unless we have analysed its conditions, and this is what the eighteenth
+century did defectively with regard to that particular virtue which so
+often usurps the name of all of the virtues together. In this respect
+Turgot's original purity of character withdrew him from the error of the
+time.
+
+[Footnote 6: Letter to Turgot, _OEuv. de Condorcet_, i. 228. See also
+vi. 264, and 523-526.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Morellet, i. 133.]
+
+With the moral quality that we have seen, Morellet adds that for the
+intellectual side Turgot as a boy had a prodigious memory. He could
+retain as many as a hundred and eighty lines of verse, after hearing
+them twice, or sometimes even once. He knew by heart most of Voltaire's
+fugitive pieces, and long passages in his poems and tragedies. His
+predominant characteristics are described as penetration, and that other
+valuable faculty to which penetration is an indispensable adjunct, but
+which it by no means invariably implies--a spirit of broad and
+systematic co-ordination. The unusual precocity of his intelligence was
+perhaps imperfectly appreciated by his fellow-students, it led him so
+far beyond any point within their sight. It has been justly said of him
+that he passed at once from infancy to manhood, and was in the rank of
+sages before he had shaken off the dust of the playground. He was of the
+type of those who strangle serpents while yet in the cradle. We know the
+temperament which from the earliest hour consumes with eager desire for
+knowledge, and energises spontaneously with unceasing and joyful
+activity in that bright and pure morning of intellectual curiosity,
+which neither the dull tumultuous needs of life nor the mists of
+spiritual misgiving have yet come up to make dim. Of this temperament
+was Turgot in a superlative degree, and its fire never abated in him
+from college days, down to the last hours while he lay racked with
+irremediable anguish.
+
+To a certain extent this was the glorious mark of all the best minds of
+the epoch; from Voltaire downwards, they were inflamed by an
+inextinguishable and universal curiosity. Voltaire hardly left a single
+corner of the field entirely unexplored in science, poetry, history,
+philosophy. Rousseau wrote a comic opera and was an ardent botanist.
+Diderot wrote, and wrote well and intelligently, _de omni scibili_, and
+was the author alike of the Letters on the Blind and Jacques le
+Fataliste. No era was ever so little the era of the specialist.
+
+       *     *     *     *     *
+
+The society of the Sorbonne corresponded exactly to a college at one of
+our universities, and will be distinguished by the careful reader from
+the faculty of theology in the university, which was usually, but not
+always, composed of _docteurs de Sorbonne_. It consisted of a large
+number of learned men in the position of fellows, and a smaller number
+of younger students, who lived together just as undergraduates do, in
+separate apartments, but with common hall, library, and garden. One of
+Turgot's masters, Sigorgne, was the first to teach in the university the
+Newtonian principles of astronomy, instead of the Cartesian hypothesis
+of vortices. As is well known, Cartesianism had for various reasons
+taken a far deeper root in France than it ever did here, and held its
+place a good generation after Newtonian ideas were accepted and taught
+at Oxford and Cambridge.[8] Voltaire's translation of the _Principia_,
+which he was prevented by the Cartesian chancellor, D'Aguesseau, from
+publishing until 1738, overthrew the reigning system, and gave a strong
+impulse to scientific inquiry.
+
+[Footnote 8: Whewell's _Hist. Induct. Sciences_, ii. 147-159.]
+
+Turgot mastered the new doctrine with avidity. In the acute letter of
+criticism which, while still at the Sorbonne, he addressed to Buffon, he
+pointedly urged it as the first objection to that writer's theory of the
+formation and movements of the planets, that any attempt at fundamental
+explanations of this kind was a departure from 'the simplicity and safe
+reserve of the philosophy of Newton.'[9] He only, however, made a
+certain advance in mathematics. He appears to have had no peculiar or
+natural aptitude for this study; though he is said to have constantly
+blamed himself for not having gone more deeply into it. It is hardly to
+be denied that mathematical genius and philosophic genius do not always
+go together. The precision, definiteness, and accurate limitations of
+the method of the one, are usually unfriendly to the brooding,
+tentative, uncircumscribed meditation which is the productive humour in
+the other. Turgot was essentially of the philosophising temper. Though
+the activity of his intelligence was incessant, his manner of work was
+the reverse of quick. 'When he applied to work,' says Morellet, 'when it
+was a question of writing or doing, he was slow and loitering. Slow,
+because he insisted on finishing all he did perfectly, according to his
+own conception of perfection, which was most difficult of attainment,
+even down to the minutest detail; and because he would not receive
+assistance, being never contented with what he had not done himself. He
+also loitered a great deal, losing time in arranging his desk and
+cutting his pens, not that he was not thinking profoundly through all
+this trifling; but mere thinking did not advance his work.'[10] We may
+admit, perhaps, that the work was all the better for the thinking that
+preceded it, and that the time which Turgot seemed to waste in cutting
+his pens and setting his table in order was more fruitfully spent than
+the busiest hours of most men.
+
+[Footnote 9: _OEuv. de Turgot_, ii. 783. (Edition of Messrs. Eugène
+Daire and H. Dussard, published in the _Collection des Principaux
+Economistes_, published by Guillaumin, 1844.)]
+
+[Footnote 10: _Mémoires_, i. 16.]
+
+We know the books which Turgot and his friends devoured with ardour.
+Locke, Bayle, Voltaire, Buffon, relieved Clarke, Leibnitz, Spinosa,
+Cudworth; and constant discussions among themselves both cleared up and
+enlarged what they read.[11] One of the disputants, certainly not the
+least amiable, has painted his own part in these discussions: 'I was
+violent in discussion,' says the good Morellet, as he was pleasantly
+called, 'but without my antagonist being able to reproach me with a
+single insult; and sometimes I used to spit blood, after a debate in
+which I had not allowed a single personality to escape me.'[12]
+
+[Footnote 11: _Ib._ i. 20.]
+
+[Footnote 12: _Ib._ i. 19.]
+
+Another member of the circle was Loménie de Brienne, who, in long years
+after, was chief minister of France for a narrow space through the
+momentous winter of 1787 and the spring of the next year, filling the
+gap between Calonne and Necker in a desperate and fatal manner.
+Loménie's ambition dated from his youth; and it was always personal and
+mean. While Turgot, his friend, was earnestly meditating on the
+destinies of the race and the conditions of their development, Loménie
+was dreaming only of the restoration of his ancestral château of
+Brienne. Though quite without means, he planned this in his visions on a
+scale of extreme costliness and magnificence. The dreams fell true.
+Money came to the family, and the château was built exactly as he had
+projected it, at a cost of two million francs.[13] His career was
+splendid. He was clever, industrious, and persevering after his fashion,
+astute, lively, pretentious, a person ever by well-planned hints leading
+you to suppose his unrevealed profundity to be bottomless; in a word, in
+all respects an impostor.[14] He espoused that richly dowered bride the
+Church, rose to be Archbishop of Toulouse, and would have risen to be
+Archbishop of Paris, but for the King's over-scrupulous conviction that
+'an Archbishop of Paris must at least believe in God.' He became an
+immense favourite with Marie Antoinette and the court, was made Minister
+'like Richelieu and Mazarin,' and after having postured and played
+tricks in face of the bursting deluge, and given the government the
+final impulse into the abyss of bankruptcy, was dismissed with the rich
+archbishopric of Sens and a cardinal's hat for himself, and good
+sinecures for his kinsfolk. His last official act was to send for the
+20,000 livres for his month's salary, not fully due. His brother, the
+Count of Brienne, remained in office as Minister of War. He was a person
+of no talent, his friends allowed, but 'assisted by a good chief clerk,
+he would have made a good minister; he meant well.' This was hardly a
+sufficient reason for letting him take 100,000 francs out of an
+impoverished treasury for the furniture of his residence. The hour,
+however, was just striking, and the knife was sharpened.
+
+[Footnote 13: Morellet's _Mémoires_, i. 17-21; 262-270; and ii. 15.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Marmontel's _Mémoires_, bk. xiii.; Morellet, however, with
+persevering friendliness, denies the truth of Marmontel's picture (ii.
+465).]
+
+All his paltry honour and glory Loménie de Brienne enjoyed for a season,
+until the Jacobins laid violent hands upon him. He poisoned himself in
+his own palace, just as a worse thing was about to befall him. Alas,
+poetic justice is the exception in history, and only once in many
+generations does the drama of the state criminal rise to an artistic
+fifth act. This was in 1794. In 1750 a farewell dinner had been given in
+the rooms of the Abbé de Brienne at the Sorbonne, and the friends made
+an appointment for a game of tennis behind the church of the Sorbonne in
+the year 1800.[15] The year came, but no Loménie, nor Turgot, and the
+Sorbonne itself had vanished.
+
+[Footnote 15: Morellet, i. 21.]
+
+When the time arrived for his final acceptance of an ecclesiastical
+destination, Turgot felt that honourable repugnance, which might have
+been anticipated alike from his morality and his intelligence, to enter
+into an engagement which would irrevocably bind him for the rest of his
+life, either always to hold exactly the same opinions, or else to
+continue to preach them publicly after he had ceased to hold them
+privately. No certainty of worldly comfort and advantage could in his
+eyes counterbalance the possible danger and shame of a position, which
+might place him between the two alternatives of stifling his
+intelligence and outraging his conscience--the one by blind,
+unscrutinising, and immovable acceptance of all the dogmas and
+sentiments of the Church; the other by the inculcation as truths of what
+he believed to be false, and the proscription as falsehoods of what he
+believed to be true. The horror and disgrace of such a situation were
+too striking for one who used his mind and acted on principle, to run
+any risk of that situation becoming his own. An ambitious timeserver
+like Loménie, or a contented adherent of use and wont like Morellet,
+might well regard such considerations as the products of a weak and
+eccentric scrupulosity. Turgot was of other calibre, holding it to be
+only a degree less unprincipled than the avowed selfishness of the
+adventurer, to contract so serious an engagement on the strength of
+common hearsay and current usage, without deliberate personal reflection
+and inquiry.
+
+At the close of his course at the Sorbonne, he wrote a letter to his
+father giving the reasons for this resolution to abandon all idea of an
+ecclesiastical career and the advancement which it offered him, and
+seeking his consent for the change from Church to law. His father
+approved of the resolution, and gave the required consent. As Turgot had
+studied law as well as theology, no time was lost, and he formally
+entered the profession of the law as Deputy-Counsellor of the
+Procureur-Général at the beginning of 1752.
+
+His college friends had remonstrated warmly at this surrender of a
+brilliant prospect. A little deputation of young abbés, fresh from their
+vows, waited on him at his rooms; in that humour of blithe and sagacious
+good-will which comes so naturally to men who believe they have just
+found out Fortune's trick and yoked her fast for ever to the car, they
+declared that he was about to do something opposed to his own interest
+and inconsistent with his usual good sense. He was a younger son of a
+Norman house, and therefore poor; the law without a competency involved
+no consideration, and he could hope for no advancement in it: whereas in
+the Church his family, being possessed of influence and credit, would
+have no difficulty in procuring for him excellent abbeys and in good
+time a rich bishopric; here he could realise all his fine dreams of
+administration, and without ceasing to be a churchman could play the
+statesman to his heart's content. In one profession he would waste his
+genius in arguing trifling private affairs, while in the other he would
+be of the highest usefulness to his country, and would acquire the
+greatest reputation. Turgot, however, insisted on placing genius and
+reputation below the necessity of being honest. The object of an oath
+might be of the least important kind, but he could neither allow himself
+to play with it, nor believe that a man could abase his profession in
+public opinion, without at the same time abasing himself. '_You shall do
+as you will_,' he said; '_for my own part, it is impossible for me to
+wear a mask all my life_.'[16]
+
+[Footnote 16: Dupont de Nemours. Condorcet's _Vie de Turgot_, pp. 8-10.]
+
+His clear intelligence revolted from the dominant sophisms of that time,
+by which philosophers as well as ecclesiastics brought falsehood and
+hypocrisy within the four corners of a decent doctrine of truth and
+morality. The churchman manfully argued that he could be most useful to
+the world if he were well off and highly placed. The philosopher
+contended that as the world would punish him if he avowed what he had
+written or what he believed, he was fully warranted in lying to the
+world as to his writing and belief; for is not the right to have the
+truth told to you, a thing forfeitable by tyranny and oppression?[17]
+Truth is not mocked, and these sophisms bore their fruit in due season.
+Perhaps if there had been found on either side in France a hundred
+righteous men like Turgot, who would not fight in masks, the end might
+have been other than it was. The lesson remains for those who dream that
+by reducing pretence to a nicely graduated system, and by leaving an
+exactly measured margin between what they really believe and what they
+feign to believe, they are serving the great cause of order. French
+history informs us what becomes of social order so served. After all, no
+man can be sure that it is required of him to save society; every man
+can be sure that he is called upon to keep himself clean from mendacity
+and equivoke. Such was Turgot's view.
+
+[Footnote 17: 'La nécessité de mentir pour désavouer un ouvrage est une
+extrémité qui répugne également à la conscience et à la noblesse du
+caractère; mais le crime est pour les hommes injustes qui rendent ce
+désaveu nécessaire à la sûreté de celui qu'ils y forcent. Si vous avez
+érigé en crime ce qui n'en est pas un, si vous avez porté atteinte, par
+des lois absurdes ou par des lois arbitraires, au droit naturel qu'ont
+tous les hommes, non seulement d'avoir une opinion, mais de la rendre
+publique, alors vous méritez de perdre celui qu'a chaque homme
+d'entendre la vérité de la bouche d'un autre, droit qui fonde seule
+l'obligation rigoureuse de ne pas mentir.'--Condorcet, _Vie de Voltaire_
+(_OEuv._ iv. 33, 34).]
+
+We have said that Turgot disdained to fight under a mask. There was one
+exception, and only one. In 1754 there appeared two letters, nominally
+from an ecclesiastic to a magistrate, and entitled _Le Conciliateur_.
+Here it is enough to say that they were intended to enforce the
+propriety and duty of religious toleration. In a letter to a friend we
+find Turgot saying, 'Although the _Conciliator_ is of my principles, and
+those of our friend, I am astonished at your conjectures; _it is neither
+his style nor mine_.'[18] Yet Turgot had written it. This is his one
+public literary equivocation. Let us, at all events, allow that it was
+resorted to, not to break the law with safety, nor to cloak a malicious
+attack on a person, but to give additional weight by means of a harmless
+prosopopoeia, to an argument for the noblest of principles.[19]
+
+[Footnote 18: _OEuv._ ii. 685. Morellet says that it was written by
+Loménie de Brienne, 19.]
+
+[Footnote 19: See the note of Dupont de Nemours, _ad loc._]
+
+       *     *     *     *     *
+
+Before Turgot entered the great world, he had already achieved an amount
+of success in philosophic speculation, which placed him in the front
+rank of social thinkers. To that passion for study and the acquisition
+of knowledge which is not uncommon in youth, as it is one of the most
+attractive of youth's qualities, there was added in him what is
+unhappily not common in men and women of any age--an active impulse to
+use his own intelligence upon the information which he gained from books
+and professors. He was no conceited or froward caviller at authority,
+nor born rebel against established teachers and governors. His
+understanding seriously craved a full and independent satisfaction, and
+could draw this only from laborious meditation, which should either
+disclose the inadequacy of the grounds for an opinion, or else establish
+it, with what would be to him a new and higher because an independently
+acquired, conclusiveness.
+
+His letter to Buffon, to which we have already referred, is an
+illustration of this wise, and never captious nor ungracious, caution in
+receiving ideas. Neither Buffon's reputation, nor the glow of his style,
+nor the dazzling ingenuity and grandeur of his conceptions--all of them
+so well calculated, at one-and-twenty, to throw even a vigilant
+intelligence off its guard--could divert Turgot from the prime
+scientific duty of confronting a theory with facts. Buffon was for
+explaining the formation of the earth and the other planets, and their
+lateral movement, by the hypothesis that a comet had fallen obliquely on
+to the sun, driven off certain portions of its constituent matter in a
+state of fusion, and that these masses, made spherical by the mutual
+attraction of their parts, were carried to different distances in
+proportion to their mass and the force originally impressed on them.
+Buffon may have been actuated, both here and in his other famous
+hypothesis of reproduction, by a desire, less to propound a true and
+durable explanation, than to arrest by a bold and comprehensive
+generalisation that attention, which is only imperfectly touched by mere
+collections of particular facts. The enormous impulse which even the
+most unscientific of the speculations of Descartes had given to European
+thought, was a standing temptation to philosophers, not to discard nor
+relax patient observation, but to bind together the results which they
+arrived at by this process, by means of some hardy hypothesis. It might
+be true or not, but it was at any rate sure to strike the imagination,
+which ever craves wholes; and to stimulate discussion and further
+discovery, by sending assailants and defenders alike in search of new
+facts, to confirm or overthrow the position.[20]
+
+[Footnote 20: See Condorcet's éloge on Buffon (_OEuv._ iii. 335); and
+a passage from Bourdon, quoted in Whewell's _Hist. Induct. Sci._ iii.
+348.]
+
+Turgot was less sensible of these possible advantages, than he was alive
+to the certain dangers of such a method. He perceived that to hold a
+theory otherwise than as an inference from facts, is to have a strong
+motive for looking at the facts in a predetermined light, or for
+ignoring them; an involuntary predisposition most fatal to the discovery
+of truth, which is nothing more than the conformity of our conception of
+facts to their adequately observed order. Why, he asks, do you replunge
+us into the night of hypotheses, justifying the Cartesians and their
+three elements and their vortices? And whence comes your comet? Was it
+within the sphere of the sun's attraction? If not, how could it fall
+from the sphere of the other bodies, and fall on the sun, which was not
+acting on it? If it was, it must have fallen perpendicularly, not
+obliquely; and, therefore, if it imparted a lateral movement, this
+direction must have been impressed on it. And, if so, why should not God
+have impressed this movement upon the planets directly, as easily as
+upon the comet to communicate it to them? Finally, how could the planets
+have left the body of the sun without falling back into it again? What
+curve did they describe in leaving it, so as never to return? Can you
+suppose that gravitation could cause the same body to describe a spiral
+and an ellipse? In the same exact spirit, Turgot brings known facts to
+bear on Buffon's theory of the arrangement of the terrestrial and marine
+divisions of the earth's surface. The whole criticism he sent to Buffon
+anonymously, to assure him that the writer had no other motive than the
+interest he took in the discovery of truth and the perfection of a great
+work.[21]
+
+[Footnote 21: October, 1748. _OEuv._ ii. 782-784.]
+
+Turgot's is probably the only case where the biographer has, in emerging
+from the days of school and college, at once to proceed to expound and
+criticise the intellectual productions of his hero, and straightway to
+present fruit and flower of a time that usually does no more than
+prepare the unseen roots. There is, perhaps, a wider and more
+stimulating attraction of a dramatic kind in the study of characters
+which present a history of active and continuous growth; which, while
+absolutely free from flimsy caprice and disordered eccentricity, are
+ever surprising our attention by an unsuspected word of calm judgment or
+fertile energy, a fresh interest or an added sympathy, by the
+disappearance of some crudity or the assimilation of some new and richer
+quality. Of such gradual rise into full maturity we have here nothing to
+record. As a student Turgot had already formed the list of a number of
+works which he designed to execute; poems, tragedies, philosophic
+romances, vast treatises on physics, history, geography, politics,
+morals, metaphysics, and language.[22] Of some he had drawn out the
+plan, and even these plans and fragments possess a novelty and depth of
+view that belong even to the integrity of few works.
+
+[Footnote 22: Condorcet's _Vie de Turgot_, 14.]
+
+Before passing on to the more scientific speculations of this remarkable
+intelligence, it is worth while to notice his letter to Madame de
+Graffigny, both for the intrinsic merit and scope of the ideas it
+contains and for the proof it furnishes of the interest, at once early
+and profound, which he took in moral questions lying at the very bottom,
+as well of sound character, as of a healthy society. Turgot's early
+passion for literature had made him seize an occasion of being
+introduced to even so moderately renowned a professor of it as Madame de
+Graffigny. He happened to be intimate with her niece, who afterwards
+became the lively and witty wife of Helvétius, somewhat to the surprise
+of Turgot's friends. For although he persuaded Mademoiselle de
+Ligniville to present him to her aunt, and though he assiduously
+attended Madame de Graffigny's literary gatherings, Turgot would
+constantly quit the circle of men of letters for the sake of a game of
+battledore with the comely and attractive niece. Hence the astonishment
+of men that from such familiarity there grew no stronger passion, and
+that whatever the causes of such reserve, the only issue was a tender
+and lasting friendship.[23]
+
+[Footnote 23: Morellet, i. 140.]
+
+Madame de Graffigny had begged Turgot's opinion upon the manuscript of a
+work composed, as so many others were, after the pattern of
+Montesquieu's _Lettres Persanes_,--now nearly thirty years old,--and
+bearing the accurately imitative title of _Lettres Peruviennes_. A
+Peruvian comes to Europe, and sends to a friend or mistress in Peru a
+series of remarks on civilisation. Goldsmith's delightful _Citizen of
+the World_ is the best known type in our own literature of this
+primitive form of social criticism. The effect upon common opinion of
+criticism cast in such a mould, presenting familiar habits,
+institutions, and observances, in a striking and unusual light, was to
+give a kind of Socratic stimulus to people's ideas about education,
+civilisation, conduct, and the other topics springing from a comparison
+between the manners of one community and another. That one of the two,
+whether Peru, or China, or Persia, was a community drawn mainly from the
+imagination, did not render the contrast any the less effective in
+stirring men's minds.
+
+By the middle of the century the air was full of ideas upon these social
+subjects. The temptation was irresistible to turn from the confusion of
+squalor, oppression, license, distorted organisation, penetrative
+disorder, to ideal states comprising a little range of simple
+circumstances, and a small number of types of virtuous and
+unsophisticated character. Much came of the relief thus sought and
+found. It was the beginning of the subversive process, for it taught men
+to look away from ideas of practical amelioration. The genius of
+Rousseau gave these dreams the shape which, in many respects, so
+unfortunately for France, finally attracted the bulk of the national
+sentiment and sympathy. But the vivid, humane, and inspiring pages of
+_Emile_ were not published until ten years after Turgot's letter to
+Madame de Graffigny:[24] a circumstance which may teach us that in moral
+as in physical discoveries, though one man may take the final step and
+reap the fame, the conditions have been prepared beforehand. It is
+almost discouraging to think that we may reproduce such passages as the
+following, without being open to the charge of slaying the slain, though
+one hundred and twenty years have elapsed since it was written.
+
+[Footnote 24: Written in 1751. _OEuv._ ii. 785-794.]
+
+'Let Zilia show that our too arbitrary institutions have too often made
+us forget nature; that we have been the dupes of our own handiwork, and
+that the savage who does not know how to consult nature knows how to
+follow her. Let her criticise our pedantry, for it is this that
+constitutes our education of the present day. Look at the Rudiments;
+they begin by insisting on stuffing into the heads of children a crowd
+of the most abstract ideas. Those whom nature in her variety summons to
+her by all her objects, we fasten up in a single spot, we occupy them on
+words which cannot convey any sense to them, because the sense of words
+can only come with ideas, and ideas only come by degrees, starting from
+sensible objects.[25] But, besides, we insist on their acquiring them
+without the help that we have had, we whom age and experience have
+formed. We keep their imagination prisoner, we deprive them of the
+sight of objects by which nature gives to the savage his first notions
+of all things, of all the sciences even. We have not the coup-d'oeil
+of nature.
+
+[Footnote 25: 'On sera surpris que je compte l'étude des langues au
+nombre des inutilités de l'éducation,' etc.--_Emile_, bk. ii.]
+
+'It is the same with morality; general ideas again spoil all. People
+take great trouble to tell a child that he must be just, temperate, and
+virtuous; and has it the least idea of virtue? Do not say to your son,
+_Be virtuous_, but make him find pleasure in being so; develop within
+his heart the germ of sentiments that nature has placed there.[26] There
+is often much more need for bulwarks against education, than against
+nature. Give him opportunities of being truthful, liberal,
+compassionate; rely on the human heart; leave these precious seeds to
+bloom in the air which surrounds them; do not stifle them under a
+quantity of frames and network. I am not one of those who want to reject
+general and abstract ideas; they are necessary; but I by no means think
+them in their place in our method of instruction. I would have them come
+to children as they come to men, by degrees.
+
+[Footnote 26: See Locke, _Of Education_, §§ 81, 184, etc.]
+
+'Another article of our education, which strikes me as bad and
+ridiculous, is our severity towards these poor children. They do
+something silly; we take them up as if it were extremely important.
+There is a multitude of these follies, of which they will cure
+themselves by age alone. But people do not count on that; they insist
+that the son should be well bred, and they overwhelm him with little
+rules of civility, often frivolous, which can only harass him, as he
+does not know the reason for them. I think it would be enough to hinder
+him from being troublesome to the persons that he sees.[27] The rest
+will come, little by little. Inspire him with the desire of pleasing; he
+will soon know more of the art than all the masters could teach him.
+People wish again that a child should be grave; they think it wise for
+it not to run, and fear every moment that it will fall. What happens?
+You weary and enfeeble it. We have especially forgotten that it is a
+part of education to form the body.'[28]
+
+[Footnote 27: 'La seule leçon de morale qui convienne à l'enfance, et la
+plus importante à tout âge, est de ne jamais faire de mal à personne,'
+etc. _Emile_, bk. ii. 'Never trouble yourself about these faults in
+them, which you know age will cure. And therefore want of well-fashioned
+civility in the carriage ... should be the parents' least care while
+they are young. If his tender mind be filled with a veneration for his
+parents and teachers, which consists in love and esteem and a fear to
+offend them; and with respect and good-will to all people; that respect
+will of itself teach these ways of expressing it, which he observes most
+acceptable,' etc.--Locke, _Of Education_, §§ 63, 67, etc.]
+
+[Footnote 28: 'Vous donnez la science, à la bonne heure; moi je m'occupe
+de l'instrument propre à l'acquérir,' etc.--_Emile._]
+
+The reader who remembers Locke's Thoughts concerning Education
+(published in 1690), and the particularly homely prescriptions upon the
+subjects of the infant body with which that treatise opens, will
+recognise the source of Turgot's inspiration. The same may be said of
+the other wise passages in this letter, upon the right attitude of a
+father towards his child. It was not merely the metaphysics of the sage
+and positive Locke which laid the revolutionary train in France. This
+influence extended over the whole field, and even Rousseau confesses the
+obligations of the imaginary governor of Emile to the real Locke.
+
+We are again plainly in the Lockian atmosphere, when Turgot speaks of
+men being the dupes of 'general ideas, which are true because drawn from
+nature, but which people embrace with a narrow stiffness that makes them
+false, because they no longer combine them with circumstances, taking
+for absolute what is only the expression of a relation.' The merit of
+this and the other educational parts of the piece, is not their
+originality, but that kind of complete and finished assimilation which
+is all but tantamount to independent thought, and which in certain
+conditions may be much more practically useful.
+
+Not less important to the happiness of men than the manner of their
+education, is their own cultivation of a wise spirit of tolerance in
+conduct. 'I should like to see explained,' Turgot says, 'the causes of
+alienation and disgust between people who love one another. I believe
+that after living awhile with men, we perceive that bickerings,
+ill-humours, teasings on trifles, perhaps cause more troubles and
+divisions among them than serious things. How many bitternesses have
+their origin in a word, in forgetfulness of some slight observances. If
+people would only weigh in an exact balance so many little wrongs, if
+they would only put themselves in the place of those who have to
+complain of them, if they would only reflect how many times they have
+themselves given way to humours, how many things they have forgotten! A
+single word spoken in disparagement of our intelligence is enough to
+make us irreconcilable, and yet how often have we been deceived in the
+very same matter. How many persons of understanding have we taken for
+fools? Why should not others have the same privilege as ourselves?...
+Ah, what address is needed to live together, to be compliant without
+cringing, to expose a fault without harshness, to correct without
+imperious air, to remonstrate without ill-temper!' All this is wise and
+good, but, alas, as Turgot had occasion by and by to say, little comes
+of giving rules instead of breeding habits.
+
+It is curious that Turgot as early in his career as this should have
+protested against one of the most dangerous doctrines of the
+_philosophe_ school. 'I have long thought,' he says, 'that our nation
+needs to have marriage and true marriage preached to it. We contract
+marriages ignobly, from views of ambition or interest; and as many of
+them are unhappy in consequence, we may see growing up from day to day a
+fashion of thinking that is extremely mischievous to the community, to
+manners, to the stability of families, and to domestic happiness and
+virtue.'[29] Looseness of opinion as to the family and the conditions of
+its wellbeing and stability, was a flaw that ran through the whole
+period of revolutionary thought. It was not surprising that the family
+should come in for its share of destructive criticism, along with the
+other elements of the established system, but it is a proof of the
+solidity of Turgot's understanding that he should from the first have
+detected the mischievousness of this side of the great social attack.
+Nor did subsequent discussion with the champions of domestic license
+have any effect upon his opinion.
+
+[Footnote 29: ii. 790.]
+
+He makes the protest which the moralist makes, and has to make in every
+age, against the practice of determining the expediency of a marriage by
+considerations of money or rank. There is a great abuse, he says, in the
+manner in which marriages are made without the two persons most
+concerned having any knowledge of one another, and solely under the
+authority of the parents, who are guided either by fortune, or else by
+station, that will one day translate itself into fortune. 'I know,' he
+says, 'that even marriages of inclination do not always succeed. So from
+the fact that sometimes people make mistakes in their choice, it is
+concluded that we ought never to choose.' Condorcet, we may remember,
+many years after, insisted on the banishment by public opinion of
+avaricious and mercenary considerations from marriage, as one of the
+most important means of diminishing the great inequalities in the
+accumulation of wealth.[30]
+
+[Footnote 30: _OEuv. de Condorcet_, vi. 245.]
+
+In the same letter he took sides by anticipation in another cardinal
+controversy of the epoch, by declaring a preference for the savage over
+the civilised state to be a 'ridiculous declamation.' This strange and
+fatal debate had been opened by Rousseau's memorable first Discourse,
+which was given to the world in 1750. Preference for the savage state
+was the peculiar form assumed by emotional protests against the existing
+system of the distribution of wealth. Turgot from first to last resisted
+the whole spirit of such protests. In this letter, where he makes his
+first approach to the subject, he insists on inequality of conditions,
+as alike necessary and useful. It is necessary 'because men are not born
+equal; because their strength, their intelligence, their passions, would
+be perpetually overthrowing that momentous equilibrium among them, which
+the laws might have established.'
+
+'What would society be without this inequality of conditions? Each
+individual would be reduced to mere necessaries, or rather there would
+be very many to whom mere necessaries would be by no means assured. Men
+cannot labour without implements and without the means of subsistence,
+until the gathering in of the produce. Those who have not had
+intelligence enough, or any opportunity to acquire these things, have no
+right to take them away from one who has earned and deserved them by his
+labour. If the idle and ignorant were to despoil the industrious and the
+skilful, all works would be discouraged, and misery would become
+universal. It is alike more just and more useful that all those who have
+fallen behind either in wit or in good fortune, should lend their right
+arms to those who know how best to employ them, who can pay them a wage
+in advance, and guarantee them a share in the future profits.... There
+is no injustice in this, that a man who has discovered a productive kind
+of work, and who has supplied his assistants with sustenance and the
+necessary implements, who for this has only made free contracts with
+them, should keep back the larger part, and that as payment for his
+advances he should have less toil and more leisure. It is this leisure
+which gives him a better chance of revolving schemes, and still further
+increasing his lights; and what he can economise from his share of the
+produce, which is with entire equity a larger share, augments his
+capital, and adds to his power of entering into new undertakings....
+
+'What would become of society, if things were not so, and if each person
+tilled his own little plot? He would also have to build his own house,
+and make his own clothes. What would the people live upon, who dwell in
+lands that produce no wheat? Who would transport the productions of one
+country to another country? The humblest peasant enjoys a multitude of
+commodities often got together from remote climes.... This distribution
+of professions necessarily leads to inequality of conditions.'
+
+So early was the rational answer ready for those socialistic sophisms
+which for so many years misled the most generous part of French
+intelligence. We may regret perhaps that in demolishing the vision of
+perfect social equality, Turgot did not show a more lively sense of the
+need for lessening and softening unavoidable inequalities of condition.
+However capable these inequalities may be of scientific defence, they
+are none the less on that account in need of incessant and strenuous
+practical modification; and it is one of the most serious misfortunes of
+society, and is unhappily long likely to remain so, that since the
+absorbing question of the reformation of the economic conditions of the
+social union has come more and more prominently to the front, gradually
+but irresistibly thrusting behind both its religious and its political
+conditions, zeal for the amelioration of the common lot has in so few
+auspicious instances been according to knowledge; while the professors
+of science have been more careful to compose narrow apologies for
+individual selfishness, than to extend as widely as possible the limits
+set by demonstrable principle to the improvement of the common life.
+
+We may notice too in this Letter, what so many of Turgot's allies and
+friends were disposed to complain of, but what will commend him to a
+less newly emancipated and therefore a less fanatical generation. There
+is a conspicuous absence of that peculiar boundlessness of hope, that
+zealous impatience for the instant realisation and fruition of all the
+inspirations of philosophic intelligence, which carried others
+immediately around him so excessively far in the creed of
+Perfectibility. 'Liberty! I answer with a sigh, maybe that men are not
+worthy of thee! Equality! They would yearn after thee, but cannot
+attain!' Compared with the confident exultation and illimitable sense of
+the worth of man which distinguished that time, there is something like
+depression here, as in many other places in Turgot's writings. It is
+usually less articulate, and is rather conveyed by a running undertone,
+which so often reveals more of a writer's true mood and temper than is
+seen in his words, giving to them, by some unconscious and inscrutable
+process, living effects upon the reader's sense like those of eye and
+voice and accompanying gesture.
+
+Dejection, however, is perhaps not the most proper word for the humour
+of reserved and grave suspense, natural in those rare spirits who have
+recognised how narrow is the way of truth and how few there be that
+enter therein, and what prolonged concurrence of favouring hazards with
+gigantic endeavour is needed for each smallest step in the halting
+advancement of the race. With Turgot this was not the result of mere
+sentimental brooding. It had a deliberate and reasoned foundation in
+historical study. He was patient and not hastily sanguine as to the
+speedy coming of the millennial future, exactly because history had
+taught him to measure the laggard paces of the past. The secret of the
+intense hopefulness of that time lay in the mournfully erroneous
+conviction that the one condition of progress is plenteous increase of
+light. Turgot saw very early that this is not so. '_It is not error_,'
+he wrote, in a saying that every champion of a new idea should have
+ever in letters of flame before his eyes, '_which opposes the progress
+of truth: it is indolence, obstinacy, the spirit of routine, everything
+that favours inaction_.'[31]
+
+[Footnote 31: _OEuv._ ii. 672.]
+
+The others left these potent elements of obstruction out of calculation
+and account. With Turgot they were the main facts to be considered, and
+the main forces to be counteracted. It is the mark of the highest kind
+of union between sagacious, firm, and clear-sighted intelligence, and a
+warm and steadfast glow of social feeling, when a man has learnt how
+little the effort of the individual can do either to hasten or direct
+the current of human destiny, and yet finds in effort his purest
+pleasure and his most constant duty. If we owe honour to that social
+endeavour which is stimulated and sustained by an enthusiastic
+confidence in speedy and full fruition, we surely owe it still more to
+those, who knowing how remote and precarious and long beyond their own
+days is the hour of fruit, yet need no other spur nor sustenance than
+bare hope, and in this strive and endeavour and still endeavour. Here
+lies the true strength, and it was the possession of this strength and
+the constant call and strain upon it, which gave Turgot in mien and
+speech a gravity that revolted the frivolous or indifferent, and seemed
+cold and timorous to the enthusiastic and urgent. Turgot had discovered
+that there was a law in the history of men, and he knew how this law
+limited and conditioned progress.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+In 1750 Turgot, then only in his twenty-fourth year, was appointed to
+the honorary office of Prior of the Sorbonne, an elective distinction
+conferred annually, as it appears, on some meritorious or highly
+connected student. It was held in the following year by Loménie de
+Brienne. In this capacity Turgot read two Latin dissertations, one at
+the opening of the session, and the other at its close. The first of
+these was upon 'The Advantages that the Establishment of Christianity
+has conferred upon the Human Race.'
+
+       *     *     *     *     *
+
+Its value, as might well have been expected from the circumstances of
+its production, is not very high. It is pitched in a tone of exaltation
+that is eminently unfavourable to the permanently profitable treatment
+of such a subject. There are in it too many of those eloquent and
+familiar commonplaces of orthodox history, by which the doubter tries to
+warm himself into belief, and the believer dreams that he is
+corroborating faith by reason. The assembly for whom his discourse was
+prepared, could hardly have endured the apparition in the midst of them
+of what both rigorous justice and accurate history required to have
+taken into account on the other side. It was not to be expected that a
+young student within the precincts of the Sorbonne should have any eyes
+for the evil with which the forms of the Christian religion, like other
+growths of the human mind, from the lowest forms of savage animism
+upwards, have ever alloyed its good. The absence of all reference to one
+half of what the annals of the various Christian churches have to teach
+us, robs the first of Turgot's discourses of that serious and durable
+quality which belongs to all his other writings.
+
+It is fair to point out that the same vicious exclusiveness was
+practised by the enemies of the Church, and that if history was to one
+of the two contending factions an exaggerated enumeration of the
+blessings of Christianity, it was to their passionate rivals only a
+monotonous catalogue of curses. Of this temper we have a curious
+illustration in the circumstance that Dupont, Turgot's intimate friend
+of later years, who collected and published his works, actually took the
+trouble to suppress the opening of this very Discourse, in which Turgot
+had replied to the reproach often made against Christianity, of being
+useful only for a future life.[32]
+
+[Footnote 32: _OEuv._ ii. 586, _n._]
+
+In the first Discourse, Turgot considers the influence of Christianity
+first upon human nature, and secondly on political societies. One
+feature at least deserves remark, and this is that in spite both of a
+settled partiality, and a certain amount of the common form of theology,
+yet at bottom and putting some phrases apart, religion is handled, and
+its workings traced, much as they would have been if treated as
+admittedly secular forces. And this was somewhat. Let us proceed to
+analyse what Turgot says.
+
+1. Before the preaching and acceptance of the new faith, all nations
+alike were plunged into the most extravagant superstitions. The most
+frightful dissoluteness of manners was encouraged by the example of the
+gods themselves. Every passion and nearly every vice was the object of a
+monstrous deification. A handful of philosophers existed, who had learnt
+no better lesson from their reason, than to despise the multitude of
+their fellows. In the midst of the universal contagion, the Jews alone
+remained pure. Even the Jews were affected with a narrow and sterile
+pride, which proved how little they appreciated the priceless treasure
+that was entrusted to their keeping. What were the effects of the
+appearance of Christ, and the revelation of the gospel? It inspired men
+with a tender zeal for the truth, and by establishing the necessity of a
+body of teachers for the instruction of nations, made studiousness and
+intellectual application indispensable in a great number of persons.
+
+Consider, again, the obscurity, incertitude, and incongruousness, that
+marked the ideas of the wisest of the ancients upon the nature of man
+and of God, and the origin of creation; the Ideas of Plato, for
+instance, the Numbers of Pythagoras, the theurgic extravagances of
+Plotinus and Porphyry and Iamblichus; and then measure the contributions
+made by the scholastic theologians, whose dry method has undergone so
+much severe condemnation, to the instruments by which knowledge is
+enlarged and made accurate. It was the Church, moreover, which
+civilised the Northern barbarians, and so preserved the West from the
+same barbarism and desolation with which the triumphs of Mahometanism
+replaced the knowledge and arts and prosperity of the East. It is to the
+services of the Church that we owe the perpetuation of a knowledge of
+the ancient tongues, and if this knowledge, and the possession of the
+masterpieces of thought and feeling and form, the flower of the ancient
+European mind, remained so long unproductive, still religious
+organisation deserves our gratitude equally for keeping these great
+treasures for happier times. They survived, as trees stripped by winter
+of their leaves survive through frost and storm, to give new blossoms in
+a new spring.
+
+This much on the intellectual side; but how can we describe the moral
+transformation which the new faith brought to pass? Men who had hitherto
+only regarded gods as beings to be entreated to avert ill or bestow
+blessing, now learnt the nobler emotion of devout love for a divinity of
+supreme power and beneficence. The new faith, besides kindling love for
+God, inflamed the kindred sentiment of love for men, all of whom it
+declared to be the children of God, one vast family with a common
+father. Julian himself bore witness to the fidelity with which the
+Christians, whose faith he hated or despised, tended the sick and fed
+the poor, not only of their own association, but those also who were
+without the fold. The horrible practice of exposing new-born infants,
+which outraged nature, and yet did not touch the heart nor the
+understanding of a Numa, an Aristotle, a Confucius, was first proscribed
+by the holy religion of Christ. If shame and misery still sometimes, in
+the hearts of poor outcast mothers, overpower the horror which
+Christianity first inspired, it is still the same religion which has
+opened sheltering places for the unhappy victims of such a practice, and
+provided means for rearing foundlings into useful citizens.
+
+Christian teaching, by reviving the principles of sensibility within the
+breast, may be said 'to have in some sort unveiled human nature to
+herself.' If the cruelty of old manners has abated, do we not owe the
+improvement to such courageous priests as Ambrose, who refused admission
+into the church to Theodosius, because in punishing a guilty city he had
+hearkened to the voice rather of wrath than of justice; or as that Pope
+who insisted that Lewis the Seventh should expiate by a rigorous penance
+the sack and burning of Vitry.[33] It is not to a Titus, a Trajanus, an
+Antoninus, that we owe the abolition of the bloody gladiatorial games;
+it is to Jesus Christ. Virtuous unbelievers have not seldom been the
+apostles of benevolence and humanity, but we rarely see them in the
+asylums of misery. Reason speaks, but it is religion that makes men act.
+How much dearer to us than the splendid monuments of antique taste,
+power, and greatness, are those Gothic edifices reared for the poor and
+the orphan, those far nobler monuments of the piety of Christian
+princes and the power of Christian faith. The rudeness of their
+architecture may wound the delicacy of our taste, but they will be ever
+beloved by feeling hearts. 'Let others admire in the retreat prepared
+for those who have sacrificed in battle their lives or their health for
+the State, all the gathered riches of the arts, displaying in the eyes
+of all the nations the magnificence of Lewis the Fourteenth, and
+carrying our renown to the level of that of Greece and Rome. What I will
+admire is such a use of those arts; the sublime glory of serving the
+weal of men raises them higher than they had ever been at Rome or at
+Athens.'
+
+[Footnote 33: See Martin's _Hist. de la France_, iii. 422. Or Morison's
+_Life of Saint Bernard_, bk. iii. ch. vi.]
+
+2. Let us turn from the action of the Christian faith in modifying the
+passions of the individual, to its influence upon societies of men. How
+has Christianity ameliorated the great art of government, with reference
+to the two characteristic aims of that art, the happiness of
+communities, and their stability? 'Nature has given all men the right of
+being happy,' but the old lawgivers abandoned nature's wise economy, by
+which she uses the desires and interests of individuals to fulfil her
+general plans and ensure the common weal. Men like Lycurgus destroyed
+all idea of property, violated the laws of modesty, and annihilated the
+tenderest ties of blood. A false and mischievous spirit of system
+seduced them away from the true method, the feeling after
+experience.[34] A general injustice reigned in the laws of all nations;
+among all of them what was called the public good was confined to a
+small number of men. Love of country was less the love of
+fellow-citizens than a common hatred towards strangers. Hence the
+barbarities practised by the ancients upon their slaves, hence that
+custom of slavery once spread over the whole earth, those horrible
+cruelties in the wars of the Greeks and the Romans, that barbarous
+inequality between the two sexes which still reigns in the East; hence
+the tyranny of the great towards the common people in hereditary
+aristocracies, the profound degradation of subject peoples. In short,
+everywhere the stronger have made the laws and have crushed the weak;
+and if they have sometimes consulted the interests of a given society,
+they have always forgotten those of the human race. To recall right and
+justice, a principle was necessary that could raise men above themselves
+and all around them, that could lead them to survey all nations and all
+conditions with an equitable gaze, and in some sort with the eyes of God
+himself. This is what religion has done. What other principle could have
+fought and vanquished both interests and prejudice united?
+
+[Footnote 34: _Les hommes en tout ne s'éclairent que par le tâtonnement
+de l'expérience._ P. 593.]
+
+Nothing but the Christian religion could have worked that general
+revolution in men's minds, which brought the rights of humanity out into
+full day, and reconciled an affectionate preference for the community of
+which one makes a part, with a general love for mankind. Even the
+horrors of war were softened, and humanity began to be spared such
+frightful sequels of triumph, as towns burnt to ashes, populations put
+to the sword, the wounded massacred in cold blood, or reserved to give a
+ghastly decoration to triumph. Slavery, where it was not abolished, was
+constantly and effectively mitigated by Christian sentiment, and the
+fact that the Church did not peremptorily insist on its universal
+abolition was due to a wise reluctance to expose the constitution of
+society to so sudden and violent a shock. Christianity without formal
+precepts, merely by inspiring a love of justice and mercy in men's
+hearts, prevented the laws from becoming an instrument of oppression,
+and held a balance between the strong and the feeble.
+
+If the history of the ancient republics shows that they hardly knew the
+difference between liberty and anarchy, and if even the profound
+Aristotle seemed unable to reconcile monarchy with a mild government, is
+not the reason to be found in the fact that before the Christian era,
+the various governments of the world only presented either an ambition
+without bound or limit, or else a blind passion for independence? a
+perpetual balance between oppression on the one side, and revolt on the
+other? In vain did lawgivers attempt to arrest this incessant struggle
+of conflicting passions by laws which were too weak for the purpose,
+because they were in too imperfect an accord with opinions and manners.
+Religion, by placing man under the eyes of an all-seeing God, imposed on
+human passions the only rein capable of effectually bridling them. It
+gave men internal laws, that were stronger than all the external bonds
+of the civil laws. By means of this internal change, it has everywhere
+had the effect of weakening despotism, so that the limits of
+Christianity seem to mark also the limits of mild government and public
+felicity. Kings saw the supreme tribunal of a God who should judge them
+and the cause of their people. Thus the distance between them and their
+subjects became as nothing in the infinite distance between kings and
+subjects alike, and the divinity that was equally elevated above either.
+They were both in some sort equalised by a common abasement. 'Ye
+nations, be subject to authority,' cried the voice of religion to the
+one; and to the other it cried, 'Ye kings, who judge the earth, learn
+that God has only entrusted you with the image of power for the
+happiness of your peoples.'
+
+An eloquent description of the efficacy of Christianity in raising human
+nature, and impressing on kings the obligation of pursuing above all
+things the wellbeing of their subjects, closes with a courtly official
+salutation of the virtues of that Very Christian King, Lewis the
+Fifteenth.
+
+       *     *     *     *     *
+
+'It is ill reasoning against religion,' an illustrious contemporary of
+Turgot's had said, in a deprecatory sentence that serves to mark the
+spirit of the time; 'to compile a long list of the evils which it has
+inflicted, without doing the same for the blessings which it has
+bestowed.'[35] Conversely we may well think it unphilosophical and
+unconvincing to enumerate all the blessings without any of the evils; to
+tell us how the Christian doctrine enlarged the human spirit, without
+observing what narrowing limitations it imposed; to dwell on all the
+mitigating influences with which the Christian churches have been
+associated, while forgetting all the ferocities which they have
+inspired. The history of European belief offers a double record since
+the decay of polytheism, and if for a certain number of centuries this
+record shows the civilisation of men's instincts by Christianity, it
+reveals to us in the centuries subsequent, the reverse process of the
+civilisation of Christianity by men's instincts. Turgot's piece treats
+half the subject as if it were the whole. He extends down to the middle
+of the eighteenth century a number of propositions and implied
+inferences, which are only true up to the beginning of the fourteenth.
+
+[Footnote 35: _Esprit des Lois_, bk. xxiv. ch. ii.]
+
+Even within this limitation there are many questions that no student of
+Turgot's capacity would now overlook, yet of which he and the most
+reasonable spirits of his age took no cognisance. The men of neither
+side in the eighteenth century knew what the history of opinion meant.
+All alike concerned themselves with its truth or falsehood, with what
+they counted to be its abstract fitness or unfitness. A perfect method
+places a man where he can command one point of view as well as the
+other, and can discern not only how far an idea is true and convenient,
+but also how, whether true and convenient or otherwise, it came into its
+place in men's minds. We ought to be able to separate in thought the
+question of the grounds and evidence for a given dogma being true, from
+the distinct and purely historic question of the social and intellectual
+conditions which made men accept it for true.
+
+Where, however, there was any question of the two religions whose
+document and standards are professedly drawn from the Bible, there the
+Frenchmen of that time assumed not a historic attitude, but one
+exclusively dogmatic. Everybody was so anxious to prove, that he had
+neither freedom nor humour to observe. The controversy as to the exact
+measure of the supernatural force in Judaism and its Christian
+development was so overwhelmingly absorbing, as to leave without light
+or explanation the wide and independent region of their place as simply
+natural forces. It may be said, and perhaps it is true, that people
+never allow the latter side of the inquiry to become prominent in their
+minds until they have settled the former, and settled it in one way:
+they must be indifferent to the details of the natural operations of a
+religion, until they are convinced that there are none of any other
+kind. Be this as it may, we have to record the facts. And it is
+difficult to imagine a Frenchman of the era of the Encyclopædia asking
+himself the sort of questions which now present themselves to the
+student in such abundance. For instance, has one effect of Christianity
+been to exalt a regard for the Sympathetic over the Æsthetic side of
+action and character? And if so, to what elements in the forms of
+Christian teaching and practice is this due? And is such a transfer of
+the highest place from the beauty to the lovableness of conduct to be
+accounted a gain, when contrasted with the relative position of the two
+sides among the Greeks and Romans?
+
+Again, we have to draw a distinction between the Christian idea and the
+outward Christian organisation, and between the consequences to human
+nature and society which flowed from the first, and the advantages which
+may be traced to the second. There was on the one hand a doctrine,
+stirring dormant spiritual instincts, and satisfying active spiritual
+needs; on the other an external institution, preserving, interpreting,
+developing, and applying the doctrine. Each of the two has its own
+origin, its own history, its own destiny in the memories of the race. We
+may attempt to estimate the functions of the one, without pronouncing on
+the exact value of the other. If the idea was the direct gift of heaven,
+the policy was due to the sagacity and mother-wit of the great
+ecclesiastical statesmen. If the doctrine was a supernatural boon, at
+least the forms in which it came gradually to overspread Europe were to
+be explained on rational and natural grounds. And if historical
+investigation of these forms and their influences should prove that they
+are the recognisable roots of most of the benign growths which are
+vaguely styled results of Christianity, then such a conclusion would
+seriously attenuate the merits of the supernatural Christian doctrine in
+favour of the human Christian policy.
+
+If there had been in the Christian idea the mysterious self-sowing
+quality so constantly claimed for it, how came it that in the Eastern
+part of the Empire it was as powerless for spiritual or moral
+regeneration as it was for political health and vitality, while in the
+Western part it became the organ of the most important of all the past
+transformations of the civilised world? Is not the difference to be
+explained by the difference in the surrounding medium, and what is the
+effect of such an explanation upon the supernatural claims of the
+Christian idea? Does such an explanation reduce that idea to the rank of
+one of the historic forces, which arise and operate and expand
+themselves in accordance with strictly natural conditions? The
+Christianity of the East was probably as degraded a form of belief, as
+lowering for human character, and as mischievous to social wellbeing, as
+has ever been held by civilised peoples. Yet the East, strangely enough,
+was the great home and nursery of all that is most distinctive in the
+constituent ideas of the Christian faith. Why, in meditating on
+Christianity, are we to shut our eyes to the depravation that overtook
+it when placed amid unfavourable social conditions, and to confine our
+gaze to the brighter qualities which it developed in the healthier
+atmosphere of the West?
+
+Further, Turgot might have asked with much profit to the cause of
+historic truth, and perhaps in more emancipated years he did ask,
+whether economic circumstances have not had more to do with the
+dissolution of slavery than Christian doctrines:--whether the rise of
+rent from free tenants over the profits to be drawn from slave-labour by
+the landowner, has not been a more powerful stimulant to emancipation,
+than the moral maxim that we ought to love one another, or the Christian
+proposition that we are all equals before the divine throne and co-heirs
+of salvation:--whether a steady and permanent fall in the price of
+slave-raised productions had not as much to do with the decay of slavery
+in Europe, as the love of God or the doctrine of human brotherhood.[36]
+That the influence of Christianity, so far as it went, and, so far as it
+was a real power, tended both to abolish slavery, and, where it was too
+feeble to press in this direction, at any rate tended to mitigate the
+harshness of its usages, is hardly to be denied by any fair-minded
+person. The true issue is what this influence amounted to. The orthodox
+historian treats it as single and omnipotent. His heterodox brother--in
+the eighteenth century they both usually belonged to one family--leaves
+it out.
+
+[Footnote 36: See on this subject Finlay's _Mediæval Greece and
+Trebizond_, p. 197; and also, on the other hand, p. 56.]
+
+The crowded annals of human misology, as well as the more terrible
+chronicle of the consequences when misology has impatiently betaken
+itself to the cruel arm of flesh, show the decisive importance of the
+precise way in which a great subject of debate is put. Now the whole
+question of religion was in those days put with radical incompleteness,
+and Turgot's dissertation was only in a harmony that might have been
+expected with the prevailing error. The champions of authority, like the
+leaders of the revolt, insisted on inquiring absolutely, not relatively;
+on judging religion with reference to human nature in the abstract,
+instead of with reference to the changing varieties of social
+institution and circumstance. We ought to place ourselves where we can
+see both lines of inquiry to be possible. We ought to place ourselves
+where we can ask what the tendencies of Christian influence have been,
+without mixing up with that question the further and distinct inquiry
+what these tendencies are now, or are likely to be. The nineteenth
+century has hitherto leaned to the historical and relative aspect of the
+great controversy. The eighteenth was characteristically dogmatic, and
+the destroyers of the faith were not any less dogmatic in their own way,
+than those who professed to be its apologists.
+
+       *     *     *     *     *
+
+Probably it was not long after the composition of this apologetic
+thesis, before Turgot became alive to the precise position of a creed
+which had come to demand apologetic theses. This was, indeed, one of the
+marked and critical moments in the great transformation of religious
+feeling and ecclesiastical order in Europe, of which our own age, four
+generations later, is watching a very decisive, if not a final stage.
+Turgot's demonstration of the beneficence of Christianity was delivered
+in July 1750--almost the exact middle of the eighteenth century. The
+death of the Emperor Charles the Sixth, ten years before, had given the
+signal for the break-up of the European system. The iron army of Prussia
+made its first stride out of the narrow northern borders, into the broad
+arena of the West, and every new illustration of the fortitude and depth
+and far-reaching power of Prussia has been a new blow to the old
+Catholic organisation. The first act of this prodigious drama closed
+while Turgot was a pupil at the Sorbonne. The court of France had
+blundered into alliances against the retrograde and Catholic house of
+Austria, while England, with equal blindness, had stumbled into
+friendship with it. Before the opening of the second act or true
+climax--that is, before the Seven Years' War began--interests and forces
+became more naturally adjusted. France, Spain, and Austria, Bourbons and
+Hapsburgs, the great pillars of the Church, were ranged against England
+and Prussia, the half-conscious representatives of those industrial and
+individualist principles which replaced, whether for a time or
+permanently, the decaying system of aristocratic caste in temporal
+things, and an ungrowing Catholicism in things spiritual. In 1750
+ecclesiastical far-sightedness, court intrigue, and family ambitions,
+were actively preparing the way for the Austrian alliance in the
+mephitic air of Versailles. The issue at stake was the maintenance of
+the supremacy of the Church, and the ancient Christian organisation of
+France and of Europe.
+
+We now know how this long battle has gone. The Jesuit Churchmen lost
+their lead, and were thrown back out of the civil and political sphere.
+We know, too, what effect these blows to the Catholic organisation have
+had upon the activity of the Catholic idea. With the decline and
+extermination of the predominance of Churchmen in civil affairs, there
+began a tendency, which has since become deeper and stronger, in the
+Church to withdraw herself and her sons from a sphere where she could no
+longer be sovereign and queen. Religion, since the Revolution, isolates
+the most devout Catholics from political action and political interests.
+This great change, however, this return of the leaders of the Christian
+society upon the original conceptions of the Christian faith, did not
+come to pass in Turgot's time. He watched the struggle of the Church for
+the maintenance of its temporal privilege and honour, and for the
+continued protection by secular power of its spiritual supremacy. The
+outcome of the struggle was later.
+
+We may say, in fine, that if this first public composition of Turgot's
+is extremely imperfect, it was better to exaggerate the services of
+Christianity, alike as an internal faith and as a peculiar form of
+social organisation, than to describe Gregory the Great and Innocent,
+Hildebrand and Bernard, as artful and vulgar tyrants, and Aquinas and
+Roger Bacon as the products of a purely barbarous, stationary, and dark
+age. There is at first sight something surprising in the respect which
+Turgot's ablest contemporaries paid to the contributions made to
+progress by Greece and Rome, compared with their angry disparagement of
+the dark ages. The reason of this contrast we soon discover to be that
+the passions of present contests gave their own colour to men's
+interpretation of the circumstances of the remote middle time, between
+the Roman Empire and the commencement of the revolutionary period.
+Turgot escaped these passions more completely than any man of his time
+who was noble enough to be endowed with the capacity for passion. He
+never forgot that it is as wise and just to confess the obligations of
+mankind to the Catholic monotheism of the West, as it is shallow and
+unjust in professors of Christianity to despise or hate the lower
+theological systems which guide the humbler families of mankind.
+
+Let us observe that only three years after this academic discourse in
+praise of the religion of the time, Turgot was declaring that 'the
+greatest of the services of Christianity to the world was that it had
+both enlightened and propagated _natural religion_.'[37]
+
+[Footnote 37: _Lettres sur la Tolérance_, II. vol. ii. 687.]
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+Turgot's inquiry into the extent and quality of the debt of European
+civilisation to Christianity was marked by a certain breadth and
+largeness, in spite of the bonds of circumstance and subject--for who,
+after all, can consider Christianity to any purpose, apart from other
+conditions of general progress, or without free comparison with other
+dogmatic systems? It is not surprising, then, to find the same valuable
+gifts of vision coming into play with a thousand times greater liberty
+and power, when the theme was widened so as to comprehend the successive
+steps of the advancement of the human mind in all its aspects. The
+Second and more famous of the two Discourses at the Sorbonne was read in
+December 1750, and professes to treat the Successive Advances of the
+Human Mind.[38] The opening lines are among the most pregnant, as they
+were among the most original, in the history of literature, and reveal
+in an outline, standing clear against the light, a thought which
+revolutionised old methods of viewing and describing the course of human
+affairs, and contained the germs of a new and most fruitful philosophy
+of society.
+
+[Footnote 38: Sur les progrés successifs de l'esprit humain. _OEuv._
+ii. 597-611.]
+
+'The phenomena of nature, subjected as they are to constant laws, are
+enclosed in a circle of revolutions that remain the same for ever. All
+comes to life again, all perishes again; and in these successive
+generations, by which vegetables and animals reproduce themselves, time
+does no more than bring back at each moment the image of what it has
+just dismissed.
+
+'The succession of men, on the contrary, offers from age to age a
+spectacle of continual variations. Reason, freedom, the passions, are
+incessantly producing new events. _All epochs are fastened together by a
+sequence of causes and effects, linking the condition of the world to
+all the conditions that have gone before it._ The gradually multiplied
+signs of speech and writing, giving men an instrument for making sure of
+the continued possession of their ideas, as well as of imparting them to
+others, have formed out of the knowledge of each individual a common
+treasure, which generation transmits to generation, as an inheritance
+constantly augmented by the discoveries of each age; and the human race,
+observed from its first beginning, seems in the eyes of the philosopher
+to be one vast whole, which, like each individual in it, has its infancy
+and its growth.'
+
+This was not a mere casual reflection in Turgot's mind, taking a
+solitary and separate position among those various and unordered ideas,
+which spring up and go on existing without visible fruit in every active
+intelligence. It was one of the systematic conceptions which shape and
+rule many groups of facts, fixing a new and high place of their own for
+them among the great divisions of knowledge. In a word, it belonged to
+the rare order of truly creative ideas, and was the root or germ of a
+whole body of vigorous and connected thought. This quality marks the
+distinction, in respect of the treatment of history, between Turgot, and
+both Bossuet and the great writers of history in France and England in
+the eighteenth century. Many of the sayings to which we are referred for
+the origin of the modern idea of history, such as Pascal's for instance,
+are the fortuitous glimpses of men of genius into a vast sea, whose
+extent they have not been led to suspect, and which only make a passing
+and momentary mark. Bossuet's talk of universal history, which has been
+so constantly praised, was fundamentally, and in substance, no more than
+a bit of theological commonplace splendidly decorated. He did indeed
+speak of 'the concatenation of human affairs,' but only in the same
+sentence with 'the sequence of the counsels of God.' The gorgeous
+rhetorician of the Church was not likely to rise philosophically into
+the larger air of universal history, properly so called. His famous
+Discourse is a vindication of divine foresight, by means of an intensely
+narrow survey of such sets of facts as might be thought not inconsistent
+with the deity's fixed purpose to make one final and decisive revelation
+to men. No one who looks upon the vast assemblage of stupendous human
+circumstances, from the first origin of man upon the earth, as merely
+the ordained antecedent of what, seen from the long procession of all
+the ages, figures in so diminutive a consummation as the Catholic
+Church, is likely to obtain a very effective hold of that broad sequence
+and many-linked chain of events, to which Bossuet gave a right name, but
+whose real meaning he never was even near seizing. His merit is that he
+did in a small and rhetorical way what Montesquieu and Voltaire
+afterwards did in a truly comprehensive and philosophical way; he
+pressed forward general ideas in connection with the recorded movements
+of the chief races of mankind. For a teacher of history to leave the
+bare chronicler's road so far as to declare, for example, the general
+principle, inadequate and over-stated as it is, that 'religion and civil
+government are the two points on which human things revolve,'--even this
+was a clear step in advance. The dismissal of the long series of
+emperors from Augustus to Alexander Severus in two or three pages was to
+show a ripe sense of large historic proportion. Again, Bossuet's
+expressions of 'the concatenation of the universe,' of the
+interdependence of the parts of so vast a whole, of there coming no
+great change without having its causes in foregoing centuries, and of
+the true object of history being to observe, in connection with each
+epoch, those secret dispositions of events which prepared the way for
+great changes, as well as the momentous conjunctures which more
+immediately brought them to pass[39]--all these phrases seem to point to
+a true and philosophic survey. But they end in themselves, and lead
+nowhither. The chain is an arbitrary and one-sided collection of facts.
+The writer does not cautiously follow and feel after the successive
+links, but forges and chooses and arrays them after a pattern of his
+own, which was fixed independently of them. A scientific term or two is
+not enough to disguise the purely theological essence of the treatise.
+
+[Footnote 39: _Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle_, part iii. ch. ii.]
+
+Montesquieu and Voltaire were both far enough removed from Bossuet's
+point of view, and the _Spirit of Laws_ of the one, and the _Essay on
+the Manners and Character of Nations_ of the other, mark a very
+different way of considering history from the lofty and confident method
+of the orthodox rhetorician. The _Spirit of Laws_ was published in 1748,
+that is to say a couple of years before Turgot's Discourse at the
+Sorbonne. Voltaire's _Essay on Manners_ did not come out until 1757, or
+seven years later than the Discourse; but Voltaire himself has told us
+that its composition dates from 1740, when he prepared this new
+presentation of European history for the service of Madame du
+Châtelet.[40] We may hence fairly consider the cardinal work of
+Montesquieu, and the cardinal historical work of Voltaire, as virtually
+belonging to the same time. And they possess a leading character in
+common, which separates them both from Turgot, and places them
+relatively to his idea in a secondary rank. In a word, Montesquieu and
+Voltaire, if we have to search their most distinctive quality,
+introduced into history systematically, and with full and decisive
+effect, a broad generality of treatment. They grouped the facts of
+history; and they did not group them locally or in accordance with mere
+geographical or chronological division, but collected the facts in
+social classes and orders from many countries and times. Their work was
+a work of classification. It showed the possibility of arranging the
+manifold and complex facts of society, and of the movements of
+communities, under heads and with reference to definite general
+conditions.
+
+[Footnote 40: Preface to _Essai sur les Moeurs_, _OEuv._ xx.]
+
+There is no need here to enter into any criticism of Montesquieu's great
+work, how far the merits of its execution equalled the merit of its
+design, how far his vicious confusion of the senses of the word 'law'
+impaired the worth of his book, as a contribution to inductive or
+comparative history. We have only to seek the difference between the
+philosophic conception of Montesquieu and the philosophic conception of
+Turgot. The latter may be considered a more liberal completion of the
+former. Turgot not only sees the operation of law in the movements and
+institutions of society, but he interprets this law in a positive and
+scientific sense, as an ascertainable succession of social states, each
+of them being the cause and effect of other social states. Turgot gives
+its deserved prominence to the fertile idea of there being an ordered
+movement of growth or advance among societies; in other words, of the
+civilisation of any given portion of mankind having fixed conditions
+analogous to those of a physical organism. Finally, he does not limit
+his thought by fixing it upon the laws and constitutions only of
+countries, but refers historical philosophy to its veritable and widest
+object and concern, the steps and conditions of the progression of the
+human mind.
+
+How, he inquires, can we seize the thread of the progress of the human
+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 Périgord
+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 Vézère, 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.
+
+Turgot was one of the men to whom good government is a religion. It
+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 débris 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 _Corvée_, 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 _corvées_ 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 _corvée_
+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 _à
+priori_ reasoning in economic matters, did, it is true, find specious
+pleas even for the road _corvée_. 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
+_corvée_, 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 _corvée_ 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 _corvée_ 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 _corvées_ 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 curés 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 curés, 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 _corvée_, 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
+régime 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 _corvée_
+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 _corvées_ 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.
+
+Apart from these, the greatest and most difficult of all Turgot's
+administrative reforms, we may notice in passing his assiduity in
+watching for the smaller opportunities of making life easier to the
+people of his province. His private benevolence was incessant and
+marked. One case of its exercise carries our minds at a word into the
+very midst of the storm of fire which purified France of the evil and
+sordid elements, that now and for his life lay like a mountain of lead
+on all Turgot's aims and efforts. A certain foreign contractor at
+Limoges was ruined by the famine of 1770. He had a clever son, whom
+Turgot charitably sent to school, and afterwards to college in Paris.
+The youth grew up to be the most eloquent and dazzling of the Girondins,
+the high-souled Vergniaud. It was not, however, in good works of merely
+private destination that Turgot mostly exercised himself. In 1767 the
+district was infested by wolves. The Intendant imposed a small tax for
+the purpose of providing rewards for the destruction of these
+tormentors, and in reading the minutes on the subject we are reminded of
+the fact, which was not without its significance when the peasants rose
+in vengeance on their lords two and twenty years later, that the
+dispersion of the hamlets and the solitude of the farms had made it
+customary for the people to go about with fire-arms. Besides encouraging
+the destruction of noxious beasts, Turgot did something for the
+preservation of beasts not noxious. The first veterinary school in
+France had been founded at Lyons in 1762. To this he sent pupils from
+his province, and eventually he founded a similar school at Limoges. He
+suppressed a tax on cattle, which acted prejudicially on breeding and
+grazing; and he introduced clover into the grass-lands. The potato had
+been unknown in Limousin. It was not common in any part of France; and
+perhaps this is not astonishing when we remember that the first field
+crop even in agricultural Scotland is supposed only to have been sown in
+the fourth decade of that century. People would not touch it, though
+the experiment of persuading them to cultivate this root had been
+frequently tried. In the Limousin the people were even more obstinate in
+their prejudice than elsewhere. But Turgot persevered, knowing how
+useful potatoes would be in a land where scarcity of grain was so
+common. The ordinary view was that they were hardly fit for pigs, and
+that in human beings they would certainly breed leprosy. Some of the
+English Puritans would not eat potatoes because they are not mentioned
+in the Bible, and that is perhaps no better a reason than the other.
+When, however, it was seen that the Intendant had the hated vegetable
+served every day at his own table, the opposition grew more faint; men
+were at last brought to consent to use potatoes for their cattle, and
+after a time even for themselves.
+
+It need scarcely be said that among Turgot's efforts for agricultural
+improvement, was the foundation of an agricultural society. This was the
+time when the passion for provincial academies of all sorts was at its
+height. When we consider that Turgot's society was not practical but
+deliberative, and what themes he proposed for discussion by it, we may
+believe that it was one of the less useful of his works. What the
+farmers needed was something much more directly instructive in the
+methods of their business, than could come of discussions as to the
+effects of indirect taxation on the revenues of landowners, or the right
+manner of valuing the income of land in the different kinds of
+cultivation. 'In that most unlucky path of French exertion,' says Arthur
+Young, 'this distinguished patriot was able to do nothing. This society
+does like other societies; they meet, converse, offer premiums, and
+publish nonsense. This is not of much consequence, for the people
+instead of reading their memoirs are not able to read at all. They can,
+however, _see_, and if a farm was established in that good cultivation
+which they ought to copy, something would be presented from which they
+_might_ learn. I asked particularly if the members of this society had
+land in their own hands, and was assured that they had; but the
+conversation presently explained it. They had _métayers_ round their
+country seats, and this was considered as farming their own lands, so
+that they assume something of a merit from the identical circumstance,
+which is the curse and ruin of the whole country.'
+
+The record of what Turgot did for manufacturing industry and commerce is
+naturally shorter than that of his efforts for the relief of the land
+and its cultivators. In the eyes of the modern economist, with his
+horror of government encouragement to industry, no matter in what time,
+place, or circumstance, some of Turgot's actions will seem of doubtful
+wisdom. At Brives, for example, with all the authority of an Intendant,
+he urged the citizens to provide buildings for carrying on a certain
+manufacture which he and others thought would be profitable to the town;
+and, as the money for the buildings did not come in very readily, he
+levied a rate both on the town and on the inhabitants of the suburbs.
+His argument was that the new works would prove indirectly beneficial to
+the whole neighbourhood. He was not long, however, in finding out, as
+the authors of such a policy generally find out, how difficult it is to
+reconcile the interests of aided manufactures with those of the
+taxpayers. It is characteristic, we may remark, of the want of public
+spirit in the great nobles, that one of Turgot's first difficulties in
+the affair was to defeat an unjust claim made by no less a personage
+than the Marshal de Noailles, to a piece of public land on which the
+proposed works were to be built. A more important industry in the
+history of Limoges sprang from the discovery, during Turgot's tenure of
+office, of the china clay which has now made the porcelain of Limoges
+only second among the French potteries to that of Sèvres itself. The
+modern pottery has been developed since the close of the Revolution,
+which checked the establishments and processes that had been directed,
+encouraged, and supervised by Turgot.
+
+To his superior enlightenment in another part of the commercial field we
+owe one of the most excellent of Turgot's pieces, his Memorial on Loans
+of Money. This plea for free trade in money has all the sense and
+liberality of the brightest side of the eighteenth century illumination.
+It was suggested by the following circumstance. At Angoulême four or
+five rogues associated together, and drew bills on one another. On these
+bills they borrowed money, the average rate of interest being from
+eight to ten per cent. When the bills fell due, instead of paying them,
+they laid informations against the lenders for taking more than the
+legal rate of interest. The lenders were ruined, persons who had money
+were afraid to make advances, bills were protested, commercial credit
+was broken, and the trade of the district was paralysed. Turgot
+prevailed upon the Council of State to withdraw the cases from the local
+jurisdiction; the proceedings against the lenders were annulled, and the
+institution of similar proceedings forbidden. This was a characteristic
+course. The royal government was generally willing in the latter half of
+the eighteenth century to redress a given case of abuse, but it never
+felt itself strong enough, or had leisure enough, to deal with the
+general source from which the particular grievance sprang. Turgot's
+Memorial is as cogent an exposure of the mischief of Usury Laws to the
+public prosperity, as the more renowned pages either of Bentham or J. B.
+Say on the same subject, and it has the merit of containing an
+explanation at once singularly patient and singularly intelligent, of
+the origin of the popular feeling about usury and its adoption by the
+legislator.
+
+After he had been eight years at his post, Turgot was called upon to
+deal with the harassing problems of a scarcity of food. In 1770 even the
+maize and black grain, and the chestnuts on which the people supported
+life, failed almost completely, and the failure extended over two years.
+The scarcity very speedily threatened to become a famine, and all its
+conditions were exasperated by the unwisdom of the authorities, and the
+selfish rapacity of the landlords. It needed all the firmness and all
+the circumspection of which Turgot was capable, to overcome the
+difficulties which the strong forces of ignorance, prejudice, and
+greediness raised up against him.
+
+His first battle was on an issue which is painfully familiar to our own
+Indian administrators at the present time. In 1764, an edict had been
+promulgated decreeing free trade in grain, not with foreign countries,
+but among the different provinces of the kingdom. This edict had not
+made much way in the minds either of the local officials or of the
+people at large, and the presence of famine made the free and
+unregulated export of food seem no better than a cruel and outrageous
+paradox. The parlement of Bordeaux at once suspended the edict of 1764.
+They ordered that all dealers in grain, farmers of land, owners of land,
+of whatever rank, quality, or condition, should forthwith convey to the
+markets of their district '_a sufficient quantity_' of grain to
+provision the said markets. The same persons were forbidden to sell
+either by wholesale or retail any portion of the said grain at their own
+granaries. Turgot at once procured from the Council at Versailles the
+proper instrument for checking this impolitic interference with the free
+circulation of grain, and he contrived this instrument in such
+conciliatory terms as to avoid any breach with the parlement, whose
+motives, for that matter, were respectable enough. In spite, however,
+of the action of the government, popular feeling ran high against free
+markets. Tumultuous gatherings of famishing men and women menaced the
+unfortunate grain-dealers. Waggoners engaged in carrying grain away from
+a place where it was cheaper, to another place where it was dearer, were
+violently arrested in their business, and terrified from proceeding.
+Hunger prevented people from discerning the unanswerable force of the
+argument that if the grain commanded a higher price somewhere else, that
+was a sure sign of the need there being more dire. The local officials
+were as hostile as their humbler neighbours. At the town of Turenne,
+they forbade grain to be taken away, and forced the owners of it to sell
+it on the spot at the market rate. At the town of Angoulême the
+lieutenant of police took upon himself to order that all the grain
+destined for the Limousin should be unloaded and stored at Angoulême.
+Turgot brought a heavy hand to bear on these breakers of administrative
+discipline, and readily procured such sanction as his authority needed
+from the Council.
+
+One of the most interesting of the measures to which Turgot resorted in
+meeting the destitution of the country, was the establishment of the
+Charitable Workshops. Some of the advocates of the famous National
+Workshops of 1848 have appealed to this example of the severe patriot,
+for a sanction to their own economic policy. It is not clear that the
+logic of the Socialist is here more remorseless than usual. If the State
+may set up workshops to aid people who are short of food because the
+harvest has failed, why should it not do the same when people are short
+of food because trade is bad, work scarce, and wages intolerably low? Of
+course Turgot's answer would have been that remorseless logic is the
+most improper instrument in the world for a business of rough
+expedients, such as government is. There is a vital difference in
+practice between opening a public workshop in the exceptional emergency
+of a famine, and keeping public workshops open as a normal interference
+with the free course of industrial activity. For the moment the
+principle may appear to be the same, but in reality the application of
+the principle means in the latter case the total disorganisation of
+industry; in the former it means no more than a temporary breach of the
+existing principles of organisation, with a view to its speedier
+revival. To invoke Turgot as a dabbler in Socialism because he opened
+_ateliers de charité_, is as unreasonable as it would be to make an
+English minister who should suspend the Bank Charter Act in a crisis,
+into the champion of an inconvertible paper currency. Turgot always
+regarded the sums paid in his works, not as wages, but as alms. All that
+he urged was that 'the best and most useful kind of alms consists in
+providing means for earning them.' To prevent the workers from earning
+aid with as little trouble to themselves as possible, he recommended
+payment by the piece and not by the day. To check workers from flocking
+in from their regular employments, he insisted on the wages being kept
+below the ordinary rate, and he urged the propriety of driving as sharp
+bargains as possible in fixing the price of the piece of work. To
+prevent the dissipation of earnings at the tavern, he paid not in money,
+but in leathern tokens, that were only current in exchange for
+provisions. All these regulations mark a wide gulf between the Economist
+of 1770 and the Socialist of 1848. Nobody was sterner than Turgot
+against beggars, the inevitable scourge of every country where the evils
+of vicious economic arrangements are aggravated by the mischievous views
+of the Catholic clergy, first, as to the duties of promiscuous
+almsgiving, and second, as to the virtue of improvident marriages. In
+1614 the States General had been for hanging all mendicants, and Colbert
+had sent them to the galleys. Turgot was less rigorous than that, but he
+would not suffer his efforts for the economic restoration of his
+province to be thwarted by the influx of these devouring parasites, and
+he sent every beggar on whom hands could be laid to prison.
+
+The story of the famine in the Limousin brings to light some instructive
+facts as to the temper of the lords and rich proprietors on the eve of
+the changes that were to destroy them. Turgot had been specially anxious
+that as much as possible of what was necessary for the relief of
+distress should be done by private persons. He knew the straits of the
+government. He knew how hard it would be to extract from it the means of
+repairing a deficit in his own finances. Accordingly he invited the
+landowners, not merely to contribute sums of money in return for the
+public works carried on in their neighbourhood, but also, by way of
+providing employment to their indigent neighbours, to undertake such
+works as they should find convenient on their own estates. The response
+was disappointing. 'The districts,' he wrote in 1772, 'where I have
+works on foot, do not give me reason to hope for much help on the side
+of the generosity of the nobles and the rich landowners. The Prince de
+Soubise is so far the only person who has given anything for the works
+that have been executed in his duchy.' Nor was abstinence from
+generosity the worst part of this failure in public spirit. The same
+nobles and landowners who refused to give, did not refuse to take away.
+Most of them proceeded at once to dismiss their _métayers_, the people
+who farmed their lands in consideration of a fixed proportion of the
+produce. Turgot, in an ordinance of admirable gravity, remonstrated
+against this harsh and impolitic proceeding. He pointed out that the
+unfortunate wretches, thus stripped of every resource, would have to
+leave the district, abandoning their wives and children to the charity
+of villages that were already overburdened with the charge of their own
+people. To cast this additional load on the villages was all the more
+unjust, because the owners of land had been exempted from one-half of
+the taxes levied on the owners of other property, exactly because the
+former were expected to provide for their own peasants. It was a claim
+less of humanity than of bare justice, that the landowners should do
+something for men with whom their relations had been so close as to be
+almost domestic, and to whose hard toil their masters owed all that they
+possessed. As a mere matter of self-interest, moreover, apart alike from
+both justice and humanity, the death or flight of the labourers would
+leave the proprietors helpless when the next good season came, and for
+want of hands the land would be doomed to barrenness for years to come,
+to the grievous detriment no less of the landowners than of the whole
+people of the realm. Accordingly, Turgot ordered all those who had
+dismissed their _métayers_ to take them back again, and he enacted
+generally that all proprietors, of whatever quality or condition, and
+whether privileged or not, should be bound to keep and support until the
+next harvest all the labourers who had been on their land in the
+previous October, as well women and children as men.
+
+Turgot's policy in this matter is more instructive as to the social
+state of France, than it may at first sight appear. At first sight we
+are astonished to find the austere economist travelling so far from the
+orthodox path of free contract as to order a landowner to furnish at his
+own cost subsistence for his impoverished tenants. But the truth is that
+the _métayer_ was not a free tenant in the sense which we attach to the
+word. '_In Limousin_,' says Arthur Young, '_the métayers are considered
+as little better than menial servants_.' And it is not going beyond the
+evidence to say that they were even something lower than menial
+servants; they were really a kind of serf-caste. They lived in the
+lowest misery. More than half of them were computed to be deeply in debt
+to the proprietors. In many cases they were even reduced every year to
+borrow from their landlord, before the harvest came round, such coarse
+bread of mixed rye and barley as he might choose to lend them. What
+Turgot therefore had in his mind was no relation of free contract,
+though it was that legally, but a relation which partly resembled that
+of a feudal lord to his retainer, and partly--as Sir Henry Maine has
+hinted--that of a planter to his negroes. It is less surprising, then,
+that Turgot should have enforced some of the responsibilities of the
+lord and the planter.
+
+The nobles had resort to a still more indefensible measure than the
+expulsion of their _métayers_. Most of the lands in the Generality of
+Limoges were charged with dues in kind payable to the lords. As the
+cultivators had for the most part no grain even for their own bread,
+they naturally had no grain for the lord's dues. The lords then insisted
+on payment in cash, and they insisted on estimating this payment at the
+famine price of the grain. Most of them were really as needy as they
+were idle and proud, and nothing is so inordinately grasping as the
+indigence of class-pride. The effect of their proceedings now was to
+increase their revenue fourfold and fivefold out of public calamity and
+universal misery. And unfortunately the liability of the cultivators in
+a given manor was _solidaire_; they were jointly and severally
+responsible, and the effect of this was that even those who were in
+circumstances to pay the quadrupled dues, were ruined and destroyed
+without mercy in consequence of having also to pay the quadrupled dues
+of their beggared neighbours. Turgot arrested this odious process by
+means of an old and forgotten decree, which he prevailed upon the
+parlement of Bordeaux to revive in good and due form, to the effect that
+the arrears of dues in kind for 1769 should be paid at the market price
+of grain when the dues were payable; that is, before the scarcity had
+declared itself.
+
+When we consider the grinding and extortionate spirit thus shown in face
+of a common calamity, we may cease to wonder at the ferocity with which,
+when the hour struck, the people tore away privilege, distinction, and
+property itself from classes that had used all three only to ruin the
+land and crush its inhabitants into the dust. And the moment that the
+lord had thus transformed himself into a mere creditor, and a creditor
+for goods delivered centuries ago, and long since consumed and
+forgotten, then it was certain that, if political circumstances favoured
+the growing economic sentiment, there would be heard again the old cry
+of the Roman plebs for an agrarian law and _novæ tabulæ_. Nay, something
+was heard that is amazingly like the cry of the modern Irish peasant. In
+1776 two noteworthy incidents happened. A certain Marquis de Vibraye
+threw into prison a peasant who refused to pay the _droit de cens_.
+Immediately between thirty and forty peasants came to the rescue, armed
+themselves, besieged the château, took it and sacked it, and drove the
+Marquis de Vibraye away in terror. Still more significant is the second
+incident, which happened shortly after. A relative of the Duke of
+Mortemart, shooting on his property, was attacked by peasants who
+insisted that he should cease his sport. They treated him with much
+brutality, and even threatened to fire on him and his attendants,
+'_claiming to be free masters of their lands_.' Here was the main root
+of the great French Revolution. A fair consideration of the details of
+such an undertaking as Turgot's administration of the Limousin helps us
+to understand two things: first, that all the ideas necessary for the
+pacific transformation of French society were there in the midst of it;
+second, that the system of privilege had fostered such a spirit in one
+class, and the reaction against the inconsiderate manifestation of that
+spirit was so violent in the other class, that good political ideas were
+vain and inapplicable.
+
+It is curious to find that, in the midst of his beneficent
+administration, Turgot was rating practical work very low in comparison
+with the achievements of the student and the thinker. 'You are very
+fortunate,' Condorcet said to him, 'in having a passion for the public
+good, and in being able to satisfy it; it is a great consolation, and of
+a very superior order to the consolation of mere study.' 'Nay,' replied
+Turgot, in his next letter, 'whatever you may say, I believe that the
+satisfaction derived from study is superior to any other kind of
+satisfaction. I am perfectly convinced that one may be, through study, a
+thousand times more useful to men than in any of our subordinate posts.
+There we torment ourselves, and often without any compensating success,
+to secure some small benefits, while we are the involuntary instrument
+of evils that are by no means small. All our small benefits are
+transitory, while the light that a man of letters is able to diffuse
+must, sooner or later, destroy all the artificial evils of the human
+race, and place it in a position to enjoy all the goods that nature
+offers.' It is clear that we can only accept Turgot's preference, on
+condition that the man of letters is engaged on work that seriously
+advances social interests and adds something to human stature. Most
+literature, nearly all literature, is distinctly subordinate and
+secondary; it only serves to pass the time of the learned or cultured
+class, without making any definite mark either on the mental habits of
+men and women, or on the institutions under which they live. Compared
+with such literature as this, the work of an administrator who makes
+life materially easier and more hopeful to the half-million of persons
+living in the Generality of Limoges or elsewhere, must be pronounced
+emphatically the worthier and more justly satisfactory.[44]
+
+[Footnote 44: See vol. i. p. 290.]
+
+Turgot himself, however, found time, in his industry at Limoges, to make
+a contribution to a kind of literature which has seriously modified the
+practical arrangements and social relations of the western world. In
+1766 he published his Essay on the Formation and Distribution of
+Wealth--a short but most pithy treatise, in which he anticipated some of
+the leading economic principles of that greater work by Adam Smith,
+which was given to the world ten years later. Turgot's Essay has none of
+the breadth of historic outlook, and none of the amplitude of concrete
+illustrations from real affairs, which make the Wealth of Nations so
+deeply fertile, so persuasive, so interesting, so thoroughly alive, so
+genuinely enriching to the understanding of the judicious reader. But
+the comparative dryness of Turgot's too concise form does not blind the
+historian of political economy to the merit of the substance of his
+propositions. It was no small proof of originality and enlightenment to
+precede Adam Smith by ten years in the doctrines of free trade, of free
+industry, of loans on interest, of the constitutive elements of price,
+of the effects of the division of labour, of the processes of the
+formation of capital. The passage on interest will bear reproducing once
+more:--'We may regard the rate of interest as a kind of level, below
+which all labour, all cultivation, all industry, all commerce ceases. It
+is like a sea spreading out over a vast district; the tops of the
+mountains rise above the waters and form fertile and cultivated islands.
+If the sea by any chance finds an outlet, then in proportion as it goes
+down, first the slopes, next the plains and valleys, appear and clothe
+themselves with productions of every kind. It is enough that the sea
+rises or falls by a foot, to inundate vast shores, or to restore them to
+cultivation and plenty.' There are not many illustrations at once so apt
+and so picturesque as this, but most of the hundred paragraphs that make
+up the Reflections are, notwithstanding one or two of the characteristic
+crotchets of Quesnai's school, both accurate and luminous.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+In May 1774 Lewis XV. died. His successor was only twenty years old; he
+was sluggish in mind, vacillating in temper, and inexperienced in
+affairs. Maurepas was recalled, to become the new king's chief adviser;
+and Maurepas, at the suggestion of one of Turgot's college friends,
+summoned the Intendant from Limoges, and placed him at the head of the
+department of marine. This post Turgot only held for a couple of months;
+he was then preferred to the great office of Controller-General. The
+condition of the national finance made its administration the most
+important of all the departments of the government. Turgot's policy in
+this high sphere belongs to the general history of France, and there is
+no occasion for us to reproduce its details here. It was mainly an
+attempt to extend over the whole realm the kind of reforms which had
+been tried on a small scale in the Limousin. He suppressed the
+_corvées_, and he tacked the money payment which was substituted for
+that burden on to the Twentieths, an impost from which the privileged
+class was not exempt. 'The weight of this charge,' he made the king say
+in the edict of suppression, 'now falls and must fall only on the
+poorest classes of our subjects.' This truth only added to the
+exasperation of the rich, and perhaps might well have been omitted.
+Along with the _corvées_ were suppressed the jurandes, or exclusive
+industrial corporations or trade-guilds, whose monopolies and
+restrictions were so mischievous an impediment to the wellbeing of the
+country. In the preamble to this edict we seem to be breathing the air,
+not of Versailles in 1775, but of the Convention in 1793:--'God, when he
+made man with wants, and rendered labour an indispensable resource, made
+the right of work the property of every individual in the world, and
+this property is the first, the most sacred, and the most
+imprescriptible of all kinds of property. We regard it as one of the
+first duties of our justice, and as one of the acts most of all worthy
+of our benevolence, to free our subjects from every infraction of that
+inalienable right of humanity.'
+
+Again, Turgot removed a tax from certain forms of lease, with a view to
+promote the substitution of a system of farming for the system of
+_métayers_. He abolished an obstructive privilege by which the Hôtel
+Dieu had the exclusive right of selling meat during Lent. The whole of
+the old incoherent and vexatious police of the corn-markets was swept
+away. Finally, he inspired the publication of a short but most
+important writing, Boncerf's _Inconvénients des Droits Féodaux_, in
+which, without criticising the origin of the privileges of the nobles,
+the author showed how much it would be to the advantage of the lords to
+accept a commutation of their feudal dues. What was still more
+exasperating both to nobles and lawyers, was the author's hardy
+assertion that if the lords refused the offer of their vassals, the king
+had the power to settle the question for them by his own legislative
+authority. This was the most important and decisive of the
+pre-revolutionary tracts.
+
+Equally violent prejudices and more sensitive interests were touched by
+two other sets of proposals. The minister began to talk of a new
+territorial contribution, and a great survey and re-assessment of the
+land. Then followed an edict restoring in good earnest the free
+circulation of corn within the kingdom. Turgot was a partisan of free
+trade in its most entire application; but for the moment he contented
+himself with the free importation of grain and its free circulation at
+home, without sanctioning its exportation abroad. Apart from changes
+thus organically affecting the industry of the country, Turgot dealt
+sternly with certain corruptions that had crept into the system of
+tax-farming, as well as with the monstrous abuses of the system of
+court-pensions.
+
+The measures we have enumerated were all excellent in themselves, and
+the state of the kingdom was such as urgently to call for them. They
+were steps towards the construction of a fabric of freedom and justice.
+But they provoked a host of bitter and irreconcilable enemies, while
+they raised up no corresponding host of energetic supporters. The reason
+of the first of these circumstances is plain enough, but the second
+demands a moment's consideration. That the country clergy should
+denounce the Philosopher, as they called him, from the pulpit and the
+steps of the altar, was natural enough. Many even of his old colleagues
+of the Encyclopædia had joined Necker against the minister. The greatest
+of them all, it is true, stood by Turgot with unfailing staunchness; a
+shower of odes, diatribes, dialogues, allegories, dissertations, came
+from the Patriarch of Ferney to confound and scatter the enemies of the
+new reforms. But the people were unmoved. If Turgot published an
+explanation of the high price of grain, they perversely took explanation
+for gratulation, and thought the Controller preferred to have bread
+dear. If he put down seditious risings with a strong hand, they insisted
+that he was in nefarious league with the corn-merchants and the bakers.
+How was it that the people did not recognise the hand of a benefactor?
+The answer is that they suspected the source of the new reforms too
+virulently to judge them calmly. For half a century, as Condorcet says
+pregnantly, they had been undergoing the evils of anarchy, while they
+supposed that they were feeling those of despotism. The error was grave,
+but it was natural, and one effect of it was to make every measure that
+proceeded from the court odious. Hence, when the parlements took up
+their judicial arms in defence of abuses and against reforms, the common
+people took sides with them, for no better reason than that this was to
+take sides against the king's government. Malesherbes in those days, and
+good writers since, held that the only safe plan was to convoke the
+States-General. They would at least have shared the responsibility with
+the crown. Turgot rejected this opinion. By doctrine, no less than by
+temperament, he disliked the control of a government by popular bodies.
+Everything for the people, nothing by the people: this was the maxim of
+the Economists, and Turgot held it in all its rigour. The royal
+authority was the only instrument that he could bring himself to use.
+Even if he could have counted on a Frederick or a Napoleon, the
+instrument would hardly have served his purposes; as things were, it was
+a broken reed, not a fine sword, that he had to his hand.
+
+The National Assembly and the Convention went to work exactly in the
+same stiff and absolute spirit as Turgot. They were just as little
+disposed to gradual, moderate, and compromising ways as he. But with
+them the absolute authority on which they leaned was real and most
+potent; with him it was a shadow. We owe it to Turgot that the
+experiment was complete: he proved that the monarchy of divine right was
+incapable of reform.[45] As it has been sententiously expressed, 'The
+part of the sages was now played out; room was now for the men of
+destiny.'
+
+[Footnote 45: Foncin's _Ministère de Turgot_, p. 574.]
+
+If the repudiation of a popular assembly was the cardinal error in
+Turgot's scheme of policy, there were other errors added. The
+publication of Boncerf's attack on the feudal dues, with the undisguised
+sanction of the minister, has been justly condemned as a grave
+imprudence, and as involving a forgetfulness of the true principles of
+government and administration, that would certainly not have been
+committed either by Colbert, in whom Turgot professed to seek his model,
+nor by Gournai, who had been his master. It was a broad promise of
+reforms which Turgot was by no means sure of being able to persuade the
+king and his council to adopt. By prematurely divulging his projects, it
+augmented the number of his adversaries, without being definite enough
+to bring new friends.[46] Again, Turgot did nothing to redeem it by
+personal conciliatoriness in carrying out the designs of a benevolent
+absolutism. The Count of Provence, afterwards Lewis XVIII., wrote a
+satire on the government during Turgot's ministry, and in it there is a
+picture of the great reformer as he appeared to his enemies: 'There was
+then in France an awkward, heavy, clumsy creature; born with more
+rudeness than character, more obstinacy than firmness, more impetuosity
+than tact; a charlatan in administration no less than in virtue, exactly
+formed to get the one decried and to disgust the world with the other;
+made harsh and distant by his self-love, and timid by his pride; as much
+a stranger to men, whom he had never known, as to the public weal, which
+he had never seen aright; this man was called Turgot.'
+
+[Footnote 46: See Mauguin's _Etudes Historiques sur l'Administration de
+l'Agriculture_, i. 353.]
+
+It is a mistake to take the word of political adversaries for a man's
+character, but adversaries sometimes only say out aloud what is already
+suspected by friends. The coarse account given by the Count of Provence
+shows us where Turgot's weakness as a ruler may have lain. He was
+distant and stiff in manner, and encouraged no one to approach him. Even
+his health went against him, for at a critical time in his short
+ministry he was confined to bed by gout for four months, and he could
+see nobody save clerks and secretaries. The very austerity, loftiness,
+and purity, which make him so reverend and inspiring a figure in the
+pages of the noble-hearted Condorcet, may well have been impediments in
+dealing with a society that, in the fatal words of the Roman historian,
+could bear neither its disorders nor their remedies.
+
+The king had once said pathetically: 'It is only M. Turgot and I who
+love the people.' But even with the king, there were points at which the
+minister's philosophic severity strained their concord. Turgot was the
+friend of Voltaire and Condorcet; he counted Christianity a form of
+superstition; and he, who as a youth had refused to go through life
+wearing the mask of the infidel abbé, had too much self-respect in his
+manhood to practise the rites and uses of a system which he considered
+a degradation of the understanding. One day the king said to Maurepas:
+'You have given me a Controller-general who never goes to mass.' 'Sire,'
+replied that ready worldling, 'the Abbé Terray always went'--and Terray
+had brought the government to bankruptcy. But Turgot hurt the king's
+conscience more directly than by staying away from mass and confession.
+Faithful to the long tradition of his ancestors, Lewis XVI. wished the
+ceremony of his coronation to take place at Rheims. Turgot urged that it
+should be performed at Paris, and as cheaply as possible. And he
+advanced on to still more delicate ground. In the rite of consecration,
+the usage was that the king should take an oath to pursue all heretics.
+Turgot demanded the suppression of this declaration of intolerance. It
+was pointed out to him that it was only a formality. But Turgot was one
+of those severe and scrupulous souls, to whom a wicked promise does not
+cease to be degrading by becoming hypocritical. And he was perfectly
+justified. It was only by the gradual extinction of the vestiges of her
+ancient barbarisms, as occasion offered, that the Church could have
+escaped the crash of the Revolution. Meanwhile, the king and the priests
+had their own way: the king was crowned at Rheims, and the priests
+exacted from him an oath to be unjust, oppressive, and cruel towards a
+portion of his subjects. Turgot could only remonstrate; but the
+philosophic memorial in which he protested in favour of religious
+freedom and equality, gave the king a serious shock.
+
+We have no space, nor would it be worth while, to describe the intrigues
+which ended in the minister's fall. Already in the previous volume, we
+have referred to the immediate and decisive share which, the queen had
+in his disgrace.[47] He was dismissed in the beginning of May 1776,
+having been in power little more than twenty months. 'You are too
+hurried,' Malesherbes had said to him. 'You think you have the love of
+the public good; not at all; you have a rage for it, for a man must be
+nothing short of enraged to insist on forcing the hand of the whole
+world.' Turgot replied, more pathetically perhaps than reasonably,
+'What, you accuse me of haste, and you know that in my family we die of
+gout at fifty!'
+
+[Footnote 47: See vol. i. p. 31.]
+
+There is something almost tragic in the joy with which Turgot's
+dismissal was received on all sides. 'I seem,' said Marmontel, 'to be
+looking at a band of brigands in the forest of Bondy, who have just
+heard that the provost-marshal has been discharged.' Voltaire and
+Condorcet were not more dismayed by the fall of the minister, than by
+the insensate delight which greeted the catastrophe. 'This event,' wrote
+Condorcet, 'has changed all nature in my eyes. I have no longer the same
+pleasure in looking at those fair landscapes over which he would have
+shed happiness and contentment. The sight of the gaiety of the people
+wrings my heart. They dance and sport, as if they had lost nothing. Ah,
+we have had a delicious dream, but it has been all too short.' Voltaire
+was equally inconsolable, and still more violent in the expression of
+his grief. When he had become somewhat calmer, he composed those
+admirable verses,--_To a Man_:
+
+
+    Philosophe indulgent, ministre citoyen,
+    Qui ne cherchas le vrai que pour faire le bien,
+    Qui d'un peuple léger et trop ingrat peut-être
+    Préparais le bonheur et celui de son maître,
+    Ce qu'on nomme disgrace a payé tes bienfaits.
+    Le vrai prix de travail n'est que de vivre en paix.
+
+
+Turgot at first showed some just and natural resentment at the levity
+with which he had been banished from power, and he put on no airs of
+theatrical philosophy. He would have been untrue to the sincerity of his
+character, if he had affected indifference or satisfaction at seeing his
+beneficent hopes for ever destroyed. But chagrin did not numb his
+industry or his wide interests. Condorcet went to visit him some months
+after his fall. He describes Turgot as reading Ariosto, as making
+experiments in physics, and as having forgotten all that had passed
+within the last two years, save when the sight of evils that he would
+have mitigated or removed, happened to remind him of it. He occupied
+himself busily with chemistry and optics, with astronomy and mechanics,
+and above all with meteorology, which was a new science in those days,
+and the value of which to the study of the conditions of human health,
+of the productions of the earth, of navigation, excited his most ardent
+anticipations. Turgot also was so moved by the necessity for a new
+synthesis of life and knowledge as to frame a plan for a great work 'on
+the human soul, the order of the universe, the Supreme Being, the
+principles of societies, the rights of men, political constitutions,
+legislation, administration, physical education, the means of perfecting
+the human race relatively to the progressive advance and employment of
+their forces, to the happiness of which they are susceptible, to the
+extent of the knowledge to which they may attain, to the certainty,
+clearness, and simplicity of the principles of conduct, to the purity of
+the feelings that spring up in men's souls.' While his mind was moving
+through these immense spaces of thought, he did not forget the things of
+the hour. He invented a machine for serving ship's cables. He wrote a
+plea for allowing Captain Cook's vessel to remain unmolested during the
+American war. With Adam Smith, with Dr. Price, with Franklin, with Hume,
+he kept up a grave and worthy correspondence. Of his own countrymen,
+Condorcet was his most faithful friend and disciple, and it is much to
+Condorcet's credit that this was so, for Turgot never gave way to the
+passionate impulses of the philosophic school against what Voltaire
+called the Infamous, that is to say, against the Church, her doctrines,
+her morality, her history.
+
+We have already said that the keyword to Turgot's political aims and
+social theory was not Pity nor Benevolence, but Justice. It was Justice
+also, not temporary Prejudice nor Passion, that guided his judgment
+through the heated issues of the time. This justice and exact
+reasonableness it was impossible to surprise or throw off its guard. His
+sublime intellectual probity never suffered itself to be tempted. He
+protested against the doctrines of Helvétius's book, _de l'Esprit_, and
+of D'Holbach's _Système de la Nature_, at a moment when some of his best
+friends were enthusiastic in admiration, for no better reason than that
+the doctrines of the two books were hateful to the ecclesiastics and
+destructive of the teaching of the Church. In the course of a
+discussion, Condorcet had maintained that in general scrupulous persons
+are not fit for great things: a Christian, he said, will waste in
+subduing the darts of the flesh time that he might have employed upon
+things that would have been useful to humanity; he will never venture to
+rise against tyrants, for fear of having formed a hasty judgment, and so
+forth in other cases. 'No virtue,' replies Turgot, 'in whatever sense
+you take the word, can dispense with justice; and I think no better of
+the people who do your _great things_ at the cost of justice, than I do
+of poets who fancy that they can produce great wonders of imagination
+without order and regularity. I know that excessive precision tends to
+deaden the fire alike of action and of composition; but there is a
+medium in everything. There has never been any question in our
+controversy of a capuchin wasting his time in quenching the darts of the
+flesh, though, by the way, in the whole sum of time wasted, the term
+expressing the time lost in satisfying the appetites of the flesh would
+probably be found to be decidedly the greater of the two.' This
+parenthesis is one of a hundred illustrations of Turgot's habitual
+refusal to be carried out of the narrow path of exact rationality, or to
+take for granted a single word of the common form of the dialect even of
+his best friends and closest associates. And the readiness with which
+men fall into common form, the levity with which they settle the most
+complex and difficult issues, stirred in Turgot what Michelet calls
+_férocité_, and Mr. Matthew Arnold calls _soeva indignatio_. 'Turgot
+was filled with an astonished, awful, oppressive sense of the _immoral
+thoughtlessness_ of men; of the heedless, hazardous way in which they
+deal with things of the greatest moment to them; of the immense,
+incalculable misery which is due to this cause' (_M. Arnold_).
+
+Turgot died on the 20th of March 1781, leaving to posterity the memory
+of a character which was more perfect and imposing than his
+performances. Condorcet saw in this harmonious union and fine balance of
+qualities the secret of his unpopularity. 'Envy,' he says, 'seems more
+closely to attend a character that approaches perfection, than one that,
+while astonishing men by its greatness, yet by exhibiting a mixture of
+defects and vices, offers a consolation that envy seeks.'
+
+
+Transcribers' Notes:
+
+Minor printer errors (omitted or incorrect punctuation) have been
+amended without note. Minor inconsistencies in hyphenation have been
+resolved where possible, or retained where there was no way to determine
+which was correct, again without note. Other errors have been amended,
+and are listed below.
+
+OE/oe ligatures have not been retained in this version.
+
+
+List of Amendments:
+
+Page 50--superstitution amended to superstition--"... treated as
+superstition by those ..."
+
+Page 126--devolopment amended to development--"... lead gradually to the
+development of sound ..."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3), by John Morley
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+
+Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3), by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3)
+       Turgot
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: October 3, 2007 [EBook #22865]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TURGOT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, René Anderson Benitz and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<h1><br />CRITICAL</h1>
+<h1>MISCELLANIES</h1>
+
+<h3>by</h3>
+
+<h2>JOHN MORLEY<br /></h2>
+
+<h5>VOL. II.</h5>
+
+<h3>Essay 2: Turgot<br /><br /></h3>
+
+<p class="center">London</p>
+<p class="center">MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY</span></p>
+<p class="center">1905<br /></p>
+
+<!--<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span></p>-->
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="TURGOT" id="TURGOT"></a>TURGOT.</h2>
+<h3>I.</h3>
+
+<div class='centered'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" width="65%" cellspacing="0" summary="CONTENTS">
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;</td><td align='right'>PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Birth and family descent</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_41'>41</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His youth at the Sorbonne</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_47'>47</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Intellectual training</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_52'>52</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His college friends: Morellet, and Lom&eacute;nie de Brienne</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_54'>54</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Turgot refused to become an ecclesiastic</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_56'>56</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His revolt against dominant sophisms of the time</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_60'>60</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Letter to Buffon</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_61'>61</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Precocity of his intellect</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_65'>65</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Letter to Madame de Graffigny</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_65'>65</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Illustrates the influence of Locke</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_69'>69</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Views on marriage</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_72'>72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>On the controversy opened by Rousseau</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_72'>72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Turgot's power of grave suspense</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_76'>76</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<h3>II.</h3>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" width="65%" cellspacing="0" summary="CONTENTS">
+<tr><td align='left'>First Discourse at the Sorbonne</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_78'>78</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Analysis of its contents</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_80'>80</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Criticisms upon it</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_86'>86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>It is one-sided</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_87'>87</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>And not truly historic</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_88'>88</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Fails to distinguish doctrine from organisation</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_89'>89</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Omits the Christianity of the East</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_90'>90</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>And economic conditions</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_92'>92</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The contemporary position of the Church in Europe</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_93'>93</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<h3>III.</h3>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" width="65%" cellspacing="0" summary="CONTENTS">
+<tr><td align='left'>Second Discourse at the Sorbonne</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_96'>96</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Its pregnant thesis of social causation</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_97'>97</a></td></tr>
+<!--<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>-->
+<tr><td align='left'>Compared with the thesis of Bossuet</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_99'>99</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>And of Montesquieu</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_100'>100</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Analysis of the Second Discourse</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_102'>102</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Characteristic of Turgot's idea of Progress</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_106'>106</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Its limitation</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_108'>108</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Great merit of the Discourse, that it recognises ordered succession</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_110'>110</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<h3>IV.</h3>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" width="65%" cellspacing="0" summary="CONTENTS">
+<tr><td align='left'>Turgot appointed Intendant of the Limousin</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_111'>111</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Functions of an Intendant</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_112'>112</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Account of the Limousin</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_114'>114</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Turgot's passion for good government</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_118'>118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>He attempts to deal with the <i>Taille</i></td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_119'>119</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The road <i>Corv&eacute;e</i></td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_121'>121</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Turgot's endeavours to enlighten opinion</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_126'>126</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Military service</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_129'>129</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;transport</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_131'>131</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The collection of taxes</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_132'>132</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Turgot's private benevolence</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_133'>133</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Introduces the potato</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_134'>134</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Founds an academy</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_135'>135</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Encourages manufacturing industry</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_136'>136</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Enlightened views on Usury</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_137'>137</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Has to deal with a scarcity</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_138'>138</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His plans</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_139'>139</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Instructive facts connected with this famine</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_142'>142</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Turgot's Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_149'>149</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<h3>V.</h3>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" width="65%" cellspacing="0" summary="CONTENTS">
+<tr><td align='left'>Turgot made Controller-General</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_150'>150</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His reforms</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_151'>151</a></td></tr>
+<!--<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span></p>-->
+<tr><td align='left'>Their reception</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_153'>153</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His unpopularity</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_156'>156</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Difficulties with the king</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_157'>157</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His dismissal</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_158'>158</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His pursuits in retirement</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_159'>159</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Conclusion</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_162'>162</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p class="center">[Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been moved to end of book.]</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>TURGOT.</h2>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I.</h2>
+
+<p>Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot was born in Paris on the 10th of May 1727. He
+died in 1781. His life covered rather more than half a century,
+extending, if we may put it a little roughly, over the middle fifty
+years of the eighteenth century. This middle period marks the exact date
+of the decisive and immediate preparation for the Revolution. At its
+beginning neither the intellectual nor the social elements of the great
+disruption had distinctly appeared, or commenced their fermentation. At
+its close their work was completed, and we may count the months thence
+until the overthrow of every institution in France. It was between 1727
+and 1781 that the true revolution took place. The events from '89 were
+only finishing strokes, the final explosion of a fabric under which
+every yard had been mined, by the long endeavour for half a century of
+an army of destroyers deliberate and involuntary, direct and oblique,
+such as the world has never at any other time beheld.</p>
+
+<p>In 1727 Voltaire was returning from his exile in England, to open the
+long campaign, of which he was from that time fo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>rth to the close of his
+days the brilliant and indomitable captain. He died in 1778, bright,
+resolute, humane, energetic, to the last. Thus Turgot's life was almost
+exactly contemporary with the pregnant era of Voltaire's activity. In
+the same spring in which Turgot died, Maurepas too came to his end, and
+Necker was dismissed. The last event was the signal at which the floods
+of the deluge fairly began to rise, and the revolutionary tide to swell.</p>
+
+<p>It will be observed, moreover, that Turgot was born half a generation
+after the first race of the speculative revolutionists. Rousseau,
+Diderot, Helv&eacute;tius, Condillac, D'Alembert, as well as the foreign Hume,
+so much the greatest of the whole band of innovators, because
+penetrating so much nearer to the depths, all came into the world which
+they were to confuse so unspeakably, in the half dozen years between
+1711 and 1717. Turgot was of later stock and comes midway between these
+fathers of the new church, between Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, and the
+generation of its fiery practical apostles, Condorcet, Mirabeau,
+Robespierre.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> The only other illustrious European of this decade was
+Adam Smith, who was born in 1723, and between whose labours and some of
+the most remarkable of Turgot's there was so much community. We cannot
+tell how far the gulf between Turgot and the earlier band was fixed by
+the accident that he did not belong to their generation in point of
+time. The accident is in itself only worth calling attention to, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>
+connection with his distance from them in other and more important
+points than time.</p>
+
+<p>The years of Turgot exactly bridge the interval between the ministry of
+the infamous Dubois and the ministry of the inglorious Calonne; between
+the despair and confusion of the close of the regency, and the despair
+and confusion of the last ten years of the monarchy. In 1727 we stand on
+the threshold of that far-resounding fiery workshop, where a hundred
+hands wrought the cunning implements and Cyclopean engines that were to
+serve in storming the hated citadels of superstition and injustice. In
+1781 we emerge from these subterranean realms into the open air, to find
+ourselves surrounded by all the sounds and portents of imminent ruin.
+This, then, is the significance of the date of Turgot's birth.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>His stock was Norman, and those who amuse themselves by finding a vital
+condition of the highest ability in antiquity of blood, may quote the
+descent of Turgot in support of their delusion. His biographers speak of
+one Togut, a Danish Prince, who walked the earth some thousand years
+before the Christian era; and of Saint Turgot in the eleventh century,
+the Prior of Durham, biographer of Bede, and first minister of Malcolm
+III. of Scotland. We shall do well not to linger in this too dark and
+frigid air. Let us pass over Togut and Saint Turgot; and the founder of
+a hospital in the thirteenth century; and the great-great-grandfather
+who sat as president of the Norman nobles in the Sta<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>tes-General of 1614,
+and the grandfather who deserted arms for the toga. History is hardly
+concerned in this solemn marshalling of shades.</p>
+
+<p>Even with Michel-Etienne, the father of Turgot, we have here no dealing.
+Let it suffice to say that he held high municipal office in Paris, and
+performed its duties with exceptional honour and spirit, giving
+sumptuous f&ecirc;tes, constructing useful public works, and on one occasion
+jeoparding his life with a fine intrepidity that did not fail in his
+son, in appeasing a bloody struggle between two bodies of Swiss and
+French guards. There is in the library of the British Museum a folio of
+1740, containing elaborate plates and letterpress, descriptive of the
+f&ecirc;tes celebrated by the city of Paris with Michel-Etienne Turgot as its
+chief officer, on the occasion of the marriage of Louise-Elizabeth of
+France to Don Philip of Spain (August 1739). As one contemplates these
+courtly sumptuosities, La Bruy&egrave;re's famous picture recurs to the mind,
+of far other scenes in the same gay land. 'We see certain wild animals,
+male and female, scattered over the fields, black, livid, all burnt by
+the sun, bound to the earth that they dig and work with unconquerable
+pertinacity; they have a sort of articulate voice, and when they rise on
+their feet, they show a human face; in fact they are men.' That these
+violent and humiliating contrasts are eternal and inevitable, is the
+last word of the dominant philosophy of society; and one of the reasons
+why Turgot's life is worth studying, is that he felt in so pre-eminent
+a degree the urge<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>ncy of lightening the destiny of that livid, wild,
+hardly articulate, ever-toiling multitude.</p>
+
+<p>The sum of the genealogical page is that Turgot inherited that position
+which, falling to worthy souls, is of its nature so invaluable, a family
+tradition of exalted courage and generous public spirit. There have been
+noble and patriotic men who lacked this inheritance, but we may be sure
+that even these would have fought the battle at greater advantage, if a
+magnanimous preference for the larger interests had come to them as a
+matter of instinctive prejudice, instead of being acquired as a matter
+of reason. The question of titular aristocracy is not touched by this
+consideration, for titular aristocracies postpone the larger interests
+to the narrow interests of their order. And Turgot's family was only of
+the secondary noblesse of the robe.</p>
+
+<p>Turgot was the third son of his father. As the employments which persons
+of respectable family could enter were definite and stereotyped, there
+was little room for debate as to the calling for which a youth should
+prepare himself. Arms, civil administration, and the church, furnished
+the only three openings for a gentleman. The effects of this rigorous
+adherence to artificial and exclusive rules of caste were manifestly
+injurious to society, as such caste rules always are after a society has
+passed beyond a certain stage. To identify the interests of the richest
+and most powerful class with the interests of the church, of the army,
+and of a given system of civil government, was in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>deed to give to that
+class the strongest motives for leaving the existing social order
+undisturbed. It unfortunately went too far in this direction, by
+fostering the strongest possible motives of hostility to such
+modifications in these gigantic departments as changing circumstances
+might make needful, in the breasts of the only men who could produce
+these modifications without a violent organic revolution. Such a system
+left too little course to spontaneity, and its curse is the curse of
+French genius. Some of its evil effects were obvious and on the surface.
+The man who should have been a soldier found himself saying mass and
+hearing confessions. Vauvenargues, who was born for diplomacy or
+literature, passed the flower of his days in the organised dreariness of
+garrisons and marches. In our own day communities and men who lead them
+have still to learn that no waste is so profuse and immeasurable, even
+from the material point of view, as that of intellectual energy,
+checked, uncultivated, ignored, or left without its opportunity. In
+France, until a very short time before the Revolution, we can hardly
+point to a single recognised usage which did not augment this waste. The
+eldest son usually preserved the rank and status of the family, whether
+civil or military. Turgot's eldest brother was to devote himself to
+civil administration, the next to be a soldier, and Turgot himself to be
+an ecclesiastic.</p>
+
+<p>The second of the brothers, who began by following arms, had as little
+taste for them as the future minister had for the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>church. It is rather
+remarkable that he seems to have had the same passion for
+administration, and he persuaded the government after the loss of Canada
+that Guiana, to be called Equinoctial France, would if well governed
+become some sort of equivalent for the northern possession. He was made
+Governor-general, but he had forgotten to take the climate into account,
+and the scheme came to an abortive end, involving him in a mass of
+confused quarrels which lasted some years. He had a marked love for
+botany, agriculture, and the like; was one of the founders of the
+Society of Agriculture in 1760; and was the author of various pieces on
+points of natural history.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p>
+
+<p>Turgot went as a boarder first to the college of Louis-le-Grand, then to
+that of Plessis; thence to the seminary of Saint Sulpice, where he took
+the degree of bachelor in theology; and from Saint Sulpice to the
+Sorbonne. His childhood and youth, like that of other men who have
+afterwards won love and admiration, have their stories. The affection of
+one biographer records how the pocket-money with which the young Turgot
+was furnished, used always instantly to disappear, no one knew how nor
+on what. It was discovered that he gave it to poor schoolfellows to
+enable them to buy books. Condorcet justly remarks on this trait, that
+'goodness and even generosity are not rare sentime<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>nts in childhood; but
+for these sentiments to be guided by such wisdom, this really seems the
+presage of an extraordinary man, all whose sentiments should be virtues,
+because they would always be controlled by reason.'<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> It is at any rate
+certain that the union of profound benevolence with judgment, which this
+story prefigures, was the supreme distinction of Turgot's character. It
+is less pleasant to learn that Turgot throughout his childhood was
+always repulsed by his mother, who deemed him sullen, because he failed
+to make his bow with good grace, and was shy and taciturn. He fled from
+her visitors, and would hide himself behind sofa or screen; until
+dragged forth for social inspection.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> This is only worth recording,
+because the same external awkwardness and lack of grace remained with
+Turgot to the end, and had something to do with the unpopularity that
+caused his fall. Perhaps he was thinking of his own childhood, when he
+wrote that fathers are often indifferent, or incessantly occupied with
+the details of business, and that he had seen the very parents who
+taught their children that there is nothing so noble as to make people
+happy, yet repulse the same children when urging some one's claim to
+charity or favour, and intimidate their young sensibility, instead of
+encouraging and training it.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span></p><p>Morellet, one of the best known of the little group of friends and
+brother students at the Sorbonne, has recorded other authentic traits.
+Turgot, he says, united the simplicity of a child to a peculiar dignity
+that forced the respect of his comrades. His modesty and reserve were
+those of a girl, and those equivocal references in which the
+undisciplined animalism of youth often has a stealthy satisfaction,
+always called the blood to his cheeks and covered him with
+embarrassment. For all that, his spirit was full of a frank gaiety, and
+he would indulge in long bursts of laughter at a pleasantry or frolic
+that struck him. We may be glad to know this, because without express
+testimony to the contrary, there would have been some reason for
+suspecting that Turgot was defective in that most wholesome and human
+quality of a capacity for laughter.</p>
+
+<p>The sensitive purity which Morellet notices, not without slight lifting
+of the eyebrow, remained with Turgot throughout his life. This was the
+more remarkable from the prevailing laxity of opinion upon this
+particular subject, perhaps the worst blemish upon the feeling and
+intelligence of the revolutionary schools. For it was not merely
+libertines, like Marmontel, making a plea for their own dissoluteness,
+who habitually spoke of these things with inconsiderate levity. Grave
+men of blameless life, like Condorcet, deliberately argued in favour of
+leaving a loose rein to the mutual inclinations of men and women, and
+laughed at the time 'wasted in quenching the darts of the flesh.'<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> It
+is true that at D'Holbach's house, the h<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>eadquarters of the dogmatic
+atheism in which the irreligious reaction culminated, this was the only
+theme on which freedom of speech was sometimes curtailed. But the fact
+that such a restriction should have been noticed, suggests that it was
+exceptional.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> One good effect followed, let us admit. The virtuousness
+of continence was not treated as a superstition by those who vindicated
+it as Turgot did, but discussed like any other virtue; and was defended
+not as an intuition of faith, but as a reasoned conclusion of the
+judgment. It was permitted to occupy no solitary and mysterious throne,
+apart and away from other conditions and parts of human excellence and
+social wellbeing. There is intrinsically no harm in any virtue being
+accepted in the firm shape of a simple prejudice. On the contrary, there
+is a multitude of practical advantages in such a consolidated and
+spontaneously working order. But in considering conduct and character,
+and forming an opinion upon infractions of a virtue, we cannot be just
+unless we have analysed its conditions, and this is what the eighteenth
+century did defectively with regard to that particular virtue which so
+often usurps the name of all of the virtues together. In this respect
+Turgot's original purity of character withdrew him from the error of the
+time.</p>
+
+<p>With the moral quality that we have seen, Morellet adds that for the
+intellectual side Turgot as a boy had a prodigious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> memory. He could
+retain as many as a hundred and eighty lines of verse, after hearing
+them twice, or sometimes even once. He knew by heart most of Voltaire's
+fugitive pieces, and long passages in his poems and tragedies. His
+predominant characteristics are described as penetration, and that other
+valuable faculty to which penetration is an indispensable adjunct, but
+which it by no means invariably implies&mdash;a spirit of broad and
+systematic co-ordination. The unusual precocity of his intelligence was
+perhaps imperfectly appreciated by his fellow-students, it led him so
+far beyond any point within their sight. It has been justly said of him
+that he passed at once from infancy to manhood, and was in the rank of
+sages before he had shaken off the dust of the playground. He was of the
+type of those who strangle serpents while yet in the cradle. We know the
+temperament which from the earliest hour consumes with eager desire for
+knowledge, and energises spontaneously with unceasing and joyful
+activity in that bright and pure morning of intellectual curiosity,
+which neither the dull tumultuous needs of life nor the mists of
+spiritual misgiving have yet come up to make dim. Of this temperament
+was Turgot in a superlative degree, and its fire never abated in him
+from college days, down to the last hours while he lay racked with
+irremediable anguish.</p>
+
+<p>To a certain extent this was the glorious mark of all the best minds of
+the epoch; from Voltaire downwards, they were inflamed by an
+inextinguishable and uni<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>versal curiosity. Voltaire hardly left a single
+corner of the field entirely unexplored in science, poetry, history,
+philosophy. Rousseau wrote a comic opera and was an ardent botanist.
+Diderot wrote, and wrote well and intelligently, <i>de omni scibili</i>, and
+was the author alike of the Letters on the Blind and Jacques le
+Fataliste. No era was ever so little the era of the specialist.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The society of the Sorbonne corresponded exactly to a college at one of
+our universities, and will be distinguished by the careful reader from
+the faculty of theology in the university, which was usually, but not
+always, composed of <i>docteurs de Sorbonne</i>. It consisted of a large
+number of learned men in the position of fellows, and a smaller number
+of younger students, who lived together just as undergraduates do, in
+separate apartments, but with common hall, library, and garden. One of
+Turgot's masters, Sigorgne, was the first to teach in the university the
+Newtonian principles of astronomy, instead of the Cartesian hypothesis
+of vortices. As is well known, Cartesianism had for various reasons
+taken a far deeper root in France than it ever did here, and held its
+place a good generation after Newtonian ideas were accepted and taught
+at Oxford and Cambridge.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> Voltaire's translation of the <i>Principia</i>,
+which he was prevented by the Cartesian chancellor, D'Aguesseau, from
+publishing until 1738, overthrew the reigning system, and gave a strong
+impulse to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> scientific inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>Turgot mastered the new doctrine with avidity. In the acute letter of
+criticism which, while still at the Sorbonne, he addressed to Buffon, he
+pointedly urged it as the first objection to that writer's theory of the
+formation and movements of the planets, that any attempt at fundamental
+explanations of this kind was a departure from 'the simplicity and safe
+reserve of the philosophy of Newton.'<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> He only, however, made a
+certain advance in mathematics. He appears to have had no peculiar or
+natural aptitude for this study; though he is said to have constantly
+blamed himself for not having gone more deeply into it. It is hardly to
+be denied that mathematical genius and philosophic genius do not always
+go together. The precision, definiteness, and accurate limitations of
+the method of the one, are usually unfriendly to the brooding,
+tentative, uncircumscribed meditation which is the productive humour in
+the other. Turgot was essentially of the philosophising temper. Though
+the activity of his intelligence was incessant, his manner of work was
+the reverse of quick. 'When he applied to work,' says Morellet, 'when it
+was a question of writing or doing, he was slow and loitering. Slow,
+because he insisted on finishing all he did perfectly, according to his
+own conception of perfection, which was most difficult of attainment,
+even down to the minutest detail; a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>nd because he would not receive
+assistance, being never contented with what he had not done himself. He
+also loitered a great deal, losing time in arranging his desk and
+cutting his pens, not that he was not thinking profoundly through all
+this trifling; but mere thinking did not advance his work.'<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> We may
+admit, perhaps, that the work was all the better for the thinking that
+preceded it, and that the time which Turgot seemed to waste in cutting
+his pens and setting his table in order was more fruitfully spent than
+the busiest hours of most men.</p>
+
+<p>We know the books which Turgot and his friends devoured with ardour.
+Locke, Bayle, Voltaire, Buffon, relieved Clarke, Leibnitz, Spinosa,
+Cudworth; and constant discussions among themselves both cleared up and
+enlarged what they read.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> One of the disputants, certainly not the
+least amiable, has painted his own part in these discussions: 'I was
+violent in discussion,' says the good Morellet, as he was pleasantly
+called, 'but without my antagonist being able to reproach me with a
+single insult; and sometimes I used to spit blood, after a debate in
+which I had not allowed a single personality to escape me.'<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></p>
+
+<p>Another member of the circle was Lom&eacute;nie de Brienne, who, in long years
+after, was chief minister of France for a narrow space through the
+momentous winter of 1787 and the spring of the next year, filling the
+gap between Calonne and Necker in a desperate and fatal manner.
+Lom&eacute;nie's ambition dated from his youth; and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>it was always personal and
+mean. While Turgot, his friend, was earnestly meditating on the
+destinies of the race and the conditions of their development, Lom&eacute;nie
+was dreaming only of the restoration of his ancestral ch&acirc;teau of
+Brienne. Though quite without means, he planned this in his visions on a
+scale of extreme costliness and magnificence. The dreams fell true.
+Money came to the family, and the ch&acirc;teau was built exactly as he had
+projected it, at a cost of two million francs.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> His career was
+splendid. He was clever, industrious, and persevering after his fashion,
+astute, lively, pretentious, a person ever by well-planned hints leading
+you to suppose his unrevealed profundity to be bottomless; in a word, in
+all respects an impostor.<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> He espoused that richly dowered bride the
+Church, rose to be Archbishop of Toulouse, and would have risen to be
+Archbishop of Paris, but for the King's over-scrupulous conviction that
+'an Archbishop of Paris must at least believe in God.' He became an
+immense favourite with Marie Antoinette and the court, was made Minister
+'like Richelieu and Mazarin,' and after having postured and played
+tricks in face of the bursting deluge, and given the government the
+final impulse into the abyss of bankruptcy, was dismissed with the rich
+archbishopric of Sens and a cardinal's hat for himself, and good
+sinecures for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> his kinsfolk. His last official act was to send for the
+20,000 livres for his month's salary, not fully due. His brother, the
+Count of Brienne, remained in office as Minister of War. He was a person
+of no talent, his friends allowed, but 'assisted by a good chief clerk,
+he would have made a good minister; he meant well.' This was hardly a
+sufficient reason for letting him take 100,000 francs out of an
+impoverished treasury for the furniture of his residence. The hour,
+however, was just striking, and the knife was sharpened.</p>
+
+<p>All his paltry honour and glory Lom&eacute;nie de Brienne enjoyed for a season,
+until the Jacobins laid violent hands upon him. He poisoned himself in
+his own palace, just as a worse thing was about to befall him. Alas,
+poetic justice is the exception in history, and only once in many
+generations does the drama of the state criminal rise to an artistic
+fifth act. This was in 1794. In 1750 a farewell dinner had been given in
+the rooms of the Abb&eacute; de Brienne at the Sorbonne, and the friends made
+an appointment for a game of tennis behind the church of the Sorbonne in
+the year 1800.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> The year came, but no Lom&eacute;nie, nor Turgot, and the
+Sorbonne itself had vanished.</p>
+
+<p>When the time arrived for his final acceptance of an ecclesiastical
+destination, Turgot felt that honourable repugnance, which might have
+been anticipated alike from his morality and his intelligence, to enter
+into an engagement which would irrevocably bind him for the rest of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+life, either always to hold exactly the same opinions, or else to
+continue to preach them publicly after he had ceased to hold them
+privately. No certainty of worldly comfort and advantage could in his
+eyes counterbalance the possible danger and shame of a position, which
+might place him between the two alternatives of stifling his
+intelligence and outraging his conscience&mdash;the one by blind,
+unscrutinising, and immovable acceptance of all the dogmas and
+sentiments of the Church; the other by the inculcation as truths of what
+he believed to be false, and the proscription as falsehoods of what he
+believed to be true. The horror and disgrace of such a situation were
+too striking for one who used his mind and acted on principle, to run
+any risk of that situation becoming his own. An ambitious timeserver
+like Lom&eacute;nie, or a contented adherent of use and wont like Morellet,
+might well regard such considerations as the products of a weak and
+eccentric scrupulosity. Turgot was of other calibre, holding it to be
+only a degree less unprincipled than the avowed selfishness of the
+adventurer, to contract so serious an engagement on the strength of
+common hearsay and current usage, without deliberate personal reflection
+and inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>At the close of his course at the Sorbonne, he wrote a letter to his
+father giving the reasons for this resolution to abandon all idea of an
+ecclesiastical career and the advancement which it offered him, and
+seeking his consent for the change from Church to law. His father
+approve<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>d of the resolution, and gave the required consent. As Turgot had
+studied law as well as theology, no time was lost, and he formally
+entered the profession of the law as Deputy-Counsellor of the
+Procureur-G&eacute;n&eacute;ral at the beginning of 1752.</p>
+
+<p>His college friends had remonstrated warmly at this surrender of a
+brilliant prospect. A little deputation of young abb&eacute;s, fresh from their
+vows, waited on him at his rooms; in that humour of blithe and sagacious
+good-will which comes so naturally to men who believe they have just
+found out Fortune's trick and yoked her fast for ever to the car, they
+declared that he was about to do something opposed to his own interest
+and inconsistent with his usual good sense. He was a younger son of a
+Norman house, and therefore poor; the law without a competency involved
+no consideration, and he could hope for no advancement in it: whereas in
+the Church his family, being possessed of influence and credit, would
+have no difficulty in procuring for him excellent abbeys and in good
+time a rich bishopric; here he could realise all his fine dreams of
+administration, and without ceasing to be a churchman could play the
+statesman to his heart's content. In one profession he would waste his
+genius in arguing trifling private affairs, while in the other he would
+be of the highest usefulness to his country, and would acquire the
+greatest reputation. Turgot, however, insisted on placing genius and
+reputation below the necessity of being honest. The object of an oath
+might be of the least important k<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>ind, but he could neither allow himself
+to play with it, nor believe that a man could abase his profession in
+public opinion, without at the same time abasing himself. '<i>You shall do
+as you will</i>,' he said; '<i>for my own part, it is impossible for me to
+wear a mask all my life</i>.'<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></p>
+
+<p>His clear intelligence revolted from the dominant sophisms of that time,
+by which philosophers as well as ecclesiastics brought falsehood and
+hypocrisy within the four corners of a decent doctrine of truth and
+morality. The churchman manfully argued that he could be most useful to
+the world if he were well off and highly placed. The philosopher
+contended that as the world would punish him if he avowed what he had
+written or what he believed, he was fully warranted in lying to the
+world as to his writing and belief; for is not the right to have the
+truth told to you, a thing forfeitable by tyranny and oppression?<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a>
+Truth is not mocked, and these sophisms bore their fruit in due season.
+Perhaps <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>if there had been found on either side in France a hundred
+righteous men like Turgot, who would not fight in masks, the end might
+have been other than it was. The lesson remains for those who dream that
+by reducing pretence to a nicely graduated system, and by leaving an
+exactly measured margin between what they really believe and what they
+feign to believe, they are serving the great cause of order. French
+history informs us what becomes of social order so served. After all, no
+man can be sure that it is required of him to save society; every man
+can be sure that he is called upon to keep himself clean from mendacity
+and equivoke. Such was Turgot's view.</p>
+
+<p>We have said that Turgot disdained to fight under a mask. There was one
+exception, and only one. In 1754 there appeared two letters, nominally
+from an ecclesiastic to a magistrate, and entitled <i>Le Conciliateur</i>.
+Here it is enough to say that they were intended to enforce the
+propriety and duty of religious toleration. In a letter to a friend we
+find Turgot saying, 'Although the <i>Conciliator</i> is of my principles, and
+those of our friend, I am astonished at your conjectures; <i>it is neither
+his style nor mine</i>.'<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> Yet Turgot had written it. This is his one
+public literary equivocation. Let us, at all events, allow that it was
+resorted to, not to break the law with safety, nor to cloak a malicious
+attack on a person, but to give additional weight by means of a harmles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>s
+prosopop&#339;ia, to an argument for the noblest of principles.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Before Turgot entered the great world, he had already achieved an amount
+of success in philosophic speculation, which placed him in the front
+rank of social thinkers. To that passion for study and the acquisition
+of knowledge which is not uncommon in youth, as it is one of the most
+attractive of youth's qualities, there was added in him what is
+unhappily not common in men and women of any age&mdash;an active impulse to
+use his own intelligence upon the information which he gained from books
+and professors. He was no conceited or froward caviller at authority,
+nor born rebel against established teachers and governors. His
+understanding seriously craved a full and independent satisfaction, and
+could draw this only from laborious meditation, which should either
+disclose the inadequacy of the grounds for an opinion, or else establish
+it, with what would be to him a new and higher because an independently
+acquired, conclusiveness.</p>
+
+<p>His letter to Buffon, to which we have already referred, is an
+illustration of this wise, and never captious nor ungracious, caution in
+receiving ideas. Neither Buffon's reputation, nor the glow of his style,
+nor the dazzling ingenuity and grandeur of his conceptions&mdash;all of them
+so well calculated, at one-and-twenty, to throw even a vigilant
+intelligence off its guard&mdash;could divert Turgot from the prime
+scientific duty of c<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>onfronting a theory with facts. Buffon was for
+explaining the formation of the earth and the other planets, and their
+lateral movement, by the hypothesis that a comet had fallen obliquely on
+to the sun, driven off certain portions of its constituent matter in a
+state of fusion, and that these masses, made spherical by the mutual
+attraction of their parts, were carried to different distances in
+proportion to their mass and the force originally impressed on them.
+Buffon may have been actuated, both here and in his other famous
+hypothesis of reproduction, by a desire, less to propound a true and
+durable explanation, than to arrest by a bold and comprehensive
+generalisation that attention, which is only imperfectly touched by mere
+collections of particular facts. The enormous impulse which even the
+most unscientific of the speculations of Descartes had given to European
+thought, was a standing temptation to philosophers, not to discard nor
+relax patient observation, but to bind together the results which they
+arrived at by this process, by means of some hardy hypothesis. It might
+be true or not, but it was at any rate sure to strike the imagination,
+which ever craves wholes; and to stimulate discussion and further
+discovery, by sending assailants and defenders alike in search of new
+facts, to confirm or overthrow the position.<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span></p><p>Turgot was less sensible of these possible advantages, than he was alive
+to the certain dangers of such a method. He perceived that to hold a
+theory otherwise than as an inference from facts, is to have a strong
+motive for looking at the facts in a predetermined light, or for
+ignoring them; an involuntary predisposition most fatal to the discovery
+of truth, which is nothing more than the conformity of our conception of
+facts to their adequately observed order. Why, he asks, do you replunge
+us into the night of hypotheses, justifying the Cartesians and their
+three elements and their vortices? And whence comes your comet? Was it
+within the sphere of the sun's attraction? If not, how could it fall
+from the sphere of the other bodies, and fall on the sun, which was not
+acting on it? If it was, it must have fallen perpendicularly, not
+obliquely; and, therefore, if it imparted a lateral movement, this
+direction must have been impressed on it. And, if so, why should not God
+have impressed this movement upon the planets directly, as easily as
+upon the comet to communicate it to them? Finally, how could the planets
+have left the body of the sun without falling back into it again? What
+curve did they describe in leaving it, so as never to return? Can you
+suppose that gravitation could cause the same body to describe a spiral
+and an ellipse? In the same exact spirit, Turgot brings known facts to
+bear on Buffon's theory of the arrangement of the terrestrial and marine
+divisions of the earth's surface. The whole criticism he sent to Buffon
+anonymously, to assure him that the writer had no other motiv<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>e than the
+interest he took in the discovery of truth and the perfection of a great
+work.<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></p>
+
+<p>Turgot's is probably the only case where the biographer has, in emerging
+from the days of school and college, at once to proceed to expound and
+criticise the intellectual productions of his hero, and straightway to
+present fruit and flower of a time that usually does no more than
+prepare the unseen roots. There is, perhaps, a wider and more
+stimulating attraction of a dramatic kind in the study of characters
+which present a history of active and continuous growth; which, while
+absolutely free from flimsy caprice and disordered eccentricity, are
+ever surprising our attention by an unsuspected word of calm judgment or
+fertile energy, a fresh interest or an added sympathy, by the
+disappearance of some crudity or the assimilation of some new and richer
+quality. Of such gradual rise into full maturity we have here nothing to
+record. As a student Turgot had already formed the list of a number of
+works which he designed to execute; poems, tragedies, philosophic
+romances, vast treatises on physics, history, geography, politics,
+morals, metaphysics, and language.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> Of some he had drawn out the
+plan, and even these plans and fragments possess a novelty and depth of
+view that belong even to the integrity of few works.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p><p>Before passing on to the more scientific speculations of this remarkable
+intelligence, it is worth while to notice his letter to Madame de
+Graffigny, both for the intrinsic merit and scope of the ideas it
+contains and for the proof it furnishes of the interest, at once early
+and profound, which he took in moral questions lying at the very bottom,
+as well of sound character, as of a healthy society. Turgot's early
+passion for literature had made him seize an occasion of being
+introduced to even so moderately renowned a professor of it as Madame de
+Graffigny. He happened to be intimate with her niece, who afterwards
+became the lively and witty wife of Helv&eacute;tius, somewhat to the surprise
+of Turgot's friends. For although he persuaded Mademoiselle de
+Ligniville to present him to her aunt, and though he assiduously
+attended Madame de Graffigny's literary gatherings, Turgot would
+constantly quit the circle of men of letters for the sake of a game of
+battledore with the comely and attractive niece. Hence the astonishment
+of men that from such familiarity there grew no stronger passion, and
+that whatever the causes of such reserve, the only issue was a tender
+and lasting friendship.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a></p>
+
+<p>Madame de Graffigny had begged Turgot's opinion upon the manuscript of a
+work composed, as so many others were, after the pattern of
+Montesquieu's <i>Lettres Persanes</i>,&mdash;now nearly thirty years old,&mdash;and
+bearing the accurately imitative title of <i>Lettres Peruviennes</i>. A
+Peruvian comes to Europe, and sends to a friend or mistress in Peru a
+series of remarks on civilisation. Goldsmith's del<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>ightful <i>Citizen of
+the World</i> is the best known type in our own literature of this
+primitive form of social criticism. The effect upon common opinion of
+criticism cast in such a mould, presenting familiar habits,
+institutions, and observances, in a striking and unusual light, was to
+give a kind of Socratic stimulus to people's ideas about education,
+civilisation, conduct, and the other topics springing from a comparison
+between the manners of one community and another. That one of the two,
+whether Peru, or China, or Persia, was a community drawn mainly from the
+imagination, did not render the contrast any the less effective in
+stirring men's minds.</p>
+
+<p>By the middle of the century the air was full of ideas upon these social
+subjects. The temptation was irresistible to turn from the confusion of
+squalor, oppression, license, distorted organisation, penetrative
+disorder, to ideal states comprising a little range of simple
+circumstances, and a small number of types of virtuous and
+unsophisticated character. Much came of the relief thus sought and
+found. It was the beginning of the subversive process, for it taught men
+to look away from ideas of practical amelioration. The genius of
+Rousseau gave these dreams the shape which, in many respects, so
+unfortunately for France, finally attracted the bulk of the national
+sentiment and sympathy. But the vivid, humane, and inspiring pages of
+<i>Emile</i> were not published until ten years after Turgot's letter to
+Madame de Graffigny:<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> a circumstance which m<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>ay teach us that in moral
+as in physical discoveries, though one man may take the final step and
+reap the fame, the conditions have been prepared beforehand. It is
+almost discouraging to think that we may reproduce such passages as the
+following, without being open to the charge of slaying the slain, though
+one hundred and twenty years have elapsed since it was written.</p>
+
+<p>'Let Zilia show that our too arbitrary institutions have too often made
+us forget nature; that we have been the dupes of our own handiwork, and
+that the savage who does not know how to consult nature knows how to
+follow her. Let her criticise our pedantry, for it is this that
+constitutes our education of the present day. Look at the Rudiments;
+they begin by insisting on stuffing into the heads of children a crowd
+of the most abstract ideas. Those whom nature in her variety summons to
+her by all her objects, we fasten up in a single spot, we occupy them on
+words which cannot convey any sense to them, because the sense of words
+can only come with ideas, and ideas only come by degrees, starting from
+sensible objects.<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> But, besides, we insist on their acquiring them
+without the help that we have had, we whom age and experience have
+formed. We keep their imagination prisoner, we deprive them of the
+sight of objects by which nature gives to the savage his first not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>ions
+of all things, of all the sciences even. We have not the coup-d'&#339;il
+of nature.</p>
+
+<p>'It is the same with morality; general ideas again spoil all. People
+take great trouble to tell a child that he must be just, temperate, and
+virtuous; and has it the least idea of virtue? Do not say to your son,
+<i>Be virtuous</i>, but make him find pleasure in being so; develop within
+his heart the germ of sentiments that nature has placed there.<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> There
+is often much more need for bulwarks against education, than against
+nature. Give him opportunities of being truthful, liberal,
+compassionate; rely on the human heart; leave these precious seeds to
+bloom in the air which surrounds them; do not stifle them under a
+quantity of frames and network. I am not one of those who want to reject
+general and abstract ideas; they are necessary; but I by no means think
+them in their place in our method of instruction. I would have them come
+to children as they come to men, by degrees.</p>
+
+<p>'Another article of our education, which strikes me as bad and
+ridiculous, is our severity towards these poor children. They do
+something silly; we take them up as if it were extremely important.
+There is a multitude of these follies, of which they will cure
+themselves by age alone. But people do not count on that; they insist
+that the son should be well bred, and they overwhelm him with little
+rules of civility, often frivolous, which can only harass him, as he
+does not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> know the reason for them. I think it would be enough to hinder
+him from being troublesome to the persons that he sees.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> The rest
+will come, little by little. Inspire him with the desire of pleasing; he
+will soon know more of the art than all the masters could teach him.
+People wish again that a child should be grave; they think it wise for
+it not to run, and fear every moment that it will fall. What happens?
+You weary and enfeeble it. We have especially forgotten that it is a
+part of education to form the body.'<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a></p>
+
+<p>The reader who remembers Locke's Thoughts concerning Education
+(published in 1690), and the particularly homely prescriptions upon the
+subjects of the infant body with which that treatise opens, will
+recognise the source of Turgot's inspiration. The same may be said of
+the other wise passages in this letter, upon the right attitude of a
+father towards his child. It was not merely the metaphysics of the sage
+and positive Locke<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> which laid the revolutionary train in France. This
+influence extended over the whole field, and even Rousseau confesses the
+obligations of the imaginary governor of Emile to the real Locke.</p>
+
+<p>We are again plainly in the Lockian atmosphere, when Turgot speaks of
+men being the dupes of 'general ideas, which are true because drawn from
+nature, but which people embrace with a narrow stiffness that makes them
+false, because they no longer combine them with circumstances, taking
+for absolute what is only the expression of a relation.' The merit of
+this and the other educational parts of the piece, is not their
+originality, but that kind of complete and finished assimilation which
+is all but tantamount to independent thought, and which in certain
+conditions may be much more practically useful.</p>
+
+<p>Not less important to the happiness of men than the manner of their
+education, is their own cultivation of a wise spirit of tolerance in
+conduct. 'I should like to see explained,' Turgot says, 'the causes of
+alienation and disgust between people who love one another. I believe
+that after living awhile with men, we perceive that bickerings,
+ill-humours, teasings on trifles, perhaps cause more troubles and
+divisions among them than serious things. How many bitternesses have
+their origin in a word, in forgetfulness of some slight observances. If
+people would only weigh in an exact balance so many little wrongs, if
+they would only put themselves in the place of those who have to
+complain of them, if they would only reflect how many ti<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>mes they have
+themselves given way to humours, how many things they have forgotten! A
+single word spoken in disparagement of our intelligence is enough to
+make us irreconcilable, and yet how often have we been deceived in the
+very same matter. How many persons of understanding have we taken for
+fools? Why should not others have the same privilege as ourselves?...
+Ah, what address is needed to live together, to be compliant without
+cringing, to expose a fault without harshness, to correct without
+imperious air, to remonstrate without ill-temper!' All this is wise and
+good, but, alas, as Turgot had occasion by and by to say, little comes
+of giving rules instead of breeding habits.</p>
+
+<p>It is curious that Turgot as early in his career as this should have
+protested against one of the most dangerous doctrines of the
+<i>philosophe</i> school. 'I have long thought,' he says, 'that our nation
+needs to have marriage and true marriage preached to it. We contract
+marriages ignobly, from views of ambition or interest; and as many of
+them are unhappy in consequence, we may see growing up from day to day a
+fashion of thinking that is extremely mischievous to the community, to
+manners, to the stability of families, and to domestic happiness and
+virtue.'<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> Looseness of opinion as to the family and the conditions of
+its wellbeing and stability, was a flaw that ran through the whole
+period of revolutionary thought. It was not surprising that the family
+should come in for its share of destruc<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>tive criticism, along with the
+other elements of the established system, but it is a proof of the
+solidity of Turgot's understanding that he should from the first have
+detected the mischievousness of this side of the great social attack.
+Nor did subsequent discussion with the champions of domestic license
+have any effect upon his opinion.</p>
+
+<p>He makes the protest which the moralist makes, and has to make in every
+age, against the practice of determining the expediency of a marriage by
+considerations of money or rank. There is a great abuse, he says, in the
+manner in which marriages are made without the two persons most
+concerned having any knowledge of one another, and solely under the
+authority of the parents, who are guided either by fortune, or else by
+station, that will one day translate itself into fortune. 'I know,' he
+says, 'that even marriages of inclination do not always succeed. So from
+the fact that sometimes people make mistakes in their choice, it is
+concluded that we ought never to choose.' Condorcet, we may remember,
+many years after, insisted on the banishment by public opinion of
+avaricious and mercenary considerations from marriage, as one of the
+most important means of diminishing the great inequalities in the
+accumulation of wealth.<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a></p>
+
+<p>In the same letter he took sides by anticipation in another cardinal
+controversy of the epoch, by declaring a preference for the savage over
+the civilised state to be a 'ridiculou<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>s declamation.' This strange and
+fatal debate had been opened by Rousseau's memorable first Discourse,
+which was given to the world in 1750. Preference for the savage state
+was the peculiar form assumed by emotional protests against the existing
+system of the distribution of wealth. Turgot from first to last resisted
+the whole spirit of such protests. In this letter, where he makes his
+first approach to the subject, he insists on inequality of conditions,
+as alike necessary and useful. It is necessary 'because men are not born
+equal; because their strength, their intelligence, their passions, would
+be perpetually overthrowing that momentous equilibrium among them, which
+the laws might have established.'</p>
+
+<p>'What would society be without this inequality of conditions? Each
+individual would be reduced to mere necessaries, or rather there would
+be very many to whom mere necessaries would be by no means assured. Men
+cannot labour without implements and without the means of subsistence,
+until the gathering in of the produce. Those who have not had
+intelligence enough, or any opportunity to acquire these things, have no
+right to take them away from one who has earned and deserved them by his
+labour. If the idle and ignorant were to despoil the industrious and the
+skilful, all works would be discouraged, and misery would become
+universal. It is alike more just and more useful that all those who have
+fallen behind either in wit or in good fortune, should lend their right
+arms to those who know how best to employ them, who can pay them <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>a wage
+in advance, and guarantee them a share in the future profits.... There
+is no injustice in this, that a man who has discovered a productive kind
+of work, and who has supplied his assistants with sustenance and the
+necessary implements, who for this has only made free contracts with
+them, should keep back the larger part, and that as payment for his
+advances he should have less toil and more leisure. It is this leisure
+which gives him a better chance of revolving schemes, and still further
+increasing his lights; and what he can economise from his share of the
+produce, which is with entire equity a larger share, augments his
+capital, and adds to his power of entering into new undertakings....</p>
+
+<p>'What would become of society, if things were not so, and if each person
+tilled his own little plot? He would also have to build his own house,
+and make his own clothes. What would the people live upon, who dwell in
+lands that produce no wheat? Who would transport the productions of one
+country to another country? The humblest peasant enjoys a multitude of
+commodities often got together from remote climes.... This distribution
+of professions necessarily leads to inequality of conditions.'</p>
+
+<p>So early was the rational answer ready for those socialistic sophisms
+which for so many years misled the most generous part of French
+intelligence. We may regret perhaps that in demolishing the vision of
+perfect social equality, Turgot did not show a more lively sense of t<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>he
+need for lessening and softening unavoidable inequalities of condition.
+However capable these inequalities may be of scientific defence, they
+are none the less on that account in need of incessant and strenuous
+practical modification; and it is one of the most serious misfortunes of
+society, and is unhappily long likely to remain so, that since the
+absorbing question of the reformation of the economic conditions of the
+social union has come more and more prominently to the front, gradually
+but irresistibly thrusting behind both its religious and its political
+conditions, zeal for the amelioration of the common lot has in so few
+auspicious instances been according to knowledge; while the professors
+of science have been more careful to compose narrow apologies for
+individual selfishness, than to extend as widely as possible the limits
+set by demonstrable principle to the improvement of the common life.</p>
+
+<p>We may notice too in this Letter, what so many of Turgot's allies and
+friends were disposed to complain of, but what will commend him to a
+less newly emancipated and therefore a less fanatical generation. There
+is a conspicuous absence of that peculiar boundlessness of hope, that
+zealous impatience for the instant realisation and fruition of all the
+inspirations of philosophic intelligence, which carried others
+immediately around him so excessively far in the creed of
+Perfectibility. 'Liberty! I answer with a sigh, maybe that men are not
+worthy of thee! Equality! They would yearn after thee, but cannot
+attain!' Compar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>ed with the confident exultation and illimitable sense of
+the worth of man which distinguished that time, there is something like
+depression here, as in many other places in Turgot's writings. It is
+usually less articulate, and is rather conveyed by a running undertone,
+which so often reveals more of a writer's true mood and temper than is
+seen in his words, giving to them, by some unconscious and inscrutable
+process, living effects upon the reader's sense like those of eye and
+voice and accompanying gesture.</p>
+
+<p>Dejection, however, is perhaps not the most proper word for the humour
+of reserved and grave suspense, natural in those rare spirits who have
+recognised how narrow is the way of truth and how few there be that
+enter therein, and what prolonged concurrence of favouring hazards with
+gigantic endeavour is needed for each smallest step in the halting
+advancement of the race. With Turgot this was not the result of mere
+sentimental brooding. It had a deliberate and reasoned foundation in
+historical study. He was patient and not hastily sanguine as to the
+speedy coming of the millennial future, exactly because history had
+taught him to measure the laggard paces of the past. The secret of the
+intense hopefulness of that time lay in the mournfully erroneous
+conviction that the one condition of progress is plenteous increase of
+light. Turgot saw very early that this is not so. '<i>It is not error</i>,'
+he wrote, in a saying that every champion of a new idea should have
+ever in letter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>s of flame before his eyes, '<i>which opposes the progress
+of truth: it is indolence, obstinacy, the spirit of routine, everything
+that favours inaction</i>.'<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a></p>
+
+<p>The others left these potent elements of obstruction out of calculation
+and account. With Turgot they were the main facts to be considered, and
+the main forces to be counteracted. It is the mark of the highest kind
+of union between sagacious, firm, and clear-sighted intelligence, and a
+warm and steadfast glow of social feeling, when a man has learnt how
+little the effort of the individual can do either to hasten or direct
+the current of human destiny, and yet finds in effort his purest
+pleasure and his most constant duty. If we owe honour to that social
+endeavour which is stimulated and sustained by an enthusiastic
+confidence in speedy and full fruition, we surely owe it still more to
+those, who knowing how remote and precarious and long beyond their own
+days is the hour of fruit, yet need no other spur nor sustenance than
+bare hope, and in this strive and endeavour and still endeavour. Here
+lies the true strength, and it was the possession of this strength and
+the constant call and strain upon it, which gave Turgot in mien and
+speech a gravity that revolted the frivolous or indifferent, and seemed
+cold and timorous to the enthusiastic and urgent. Turgot had discovered
+that there was a law in the history of men, and he knew how this law
+limited and conditioned progress.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In 1750 Turgot, then only in his twenty-fourth year, was appointed to
+the honorary office of Prior of the Sorbonne, an elective distinction
+conferred annually, as it appears, on some meritorious or highly
+connected student. It was held in the following year by Lom&eacute;nie de
+Brienne. In this capacity Turgot read two Latin dissertations, one at
+the opening of the session, and the other at its close. The first of
+these was upon 'The Advantages that the Establishment of Christianity
+has conferred upon the Human Race.'</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Its value, as might well have been expected from the circumstances of
+its production, is not very high. It is pitched in a tone of exaltation
+that is eminently unfavourable to the permanently profitable treatment
+of such a subject. There are in it too many of those eloquent and
+familiar commonplaces of orthodox history, by which the doubter tries to
+warm himself into belief, and the believer dreams that he is
+corroborating faith by reason. The assembly for whom his discourse was
+prepared, could hardly have endured the apparition in the midst of them
+of what both rigorous justice and accurate history required to have
+taken into account on the other side. It was not to be expected that a
+young student within the precincts of the Sorbonne should have any eyes
+for the evil with which the forms of the Christian religion, like other
+growths of the human mind, from the lowest forms of savage animism
+upwards, have ever alloyed its good. The a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>bsence of all reference to one
+half of what the annals of the various Christian churches have to teach
+us, robs the first of Turgot's discourses of that serious and durable
+quality which belongs to all his other writings.</p>
+
+<p>It is fair to point out that the same vicious exclusiveness was
+practised by the enemies of the Church, and that if history was to one
+of the two contending factions an exaggerated enumeration of the
+blessings of Christianity, it was to their passionate rivals only a
+monotonous catalogue of curses. Of this temper we have a curious
+illustration in the circumstance that Dupont, Turgot's intimate friend
+of later years, who collected and published his works, actually took the
+trouble to suppress the opening of this very Discourse, in which Turgot
+had replied to the reproach often made against Christianity, of being
+useful only for a future life.<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a></p>
+
+<p>In the first Discourse, Turgot considers the influence of Christianity
+first upon human nature, and secondly on political societies. One
+feature at least deserves remark, and this is that in spite both of a
+settled partiality, and a certain amount of the common form of theology,
+yet at bottom and putting some phrases apart, religion is handled, and
+its workings traced, much as they would have been if treated as
+admittedly secular forces. And this was somewhat. Let us proceed to
+analyse what Turgot says.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p>
+<p>1. Before the preaching and acceptance of the new faith, all nations
+alike were plunged into the most extravagant superstitions. The most
+frightful dissoluteness of manners was encouraged by the example of the
+gods themselves. Every passion and nearly every vice was the object of a
+monstrous deification. A handful of philosophers existed, who had learnt
+no better lesson from their reason, than to despise the multitude of
+their fellows. In the midst of the universal contagion, the Jews alone
+remained pure. Even the Jews were affected with a narrow and sterile
+pride, which proved how little they appreciated the priceless treasure
+that was entrusted to their keeping. What were the effects of the
+appearance of Christ, and the revelation of the gospel? It inspired men
+with a tender zeal for the truth, and by establishing the necessity of a
+body of teachers for the instruction of nations, made studiousness and
+intellectual application indispensable in a great number of persons.</p>
+
+<p>Consider, again, the obscurity, incertitude, and incongruousness, that
+marked the ideas of the wisest of the ancients upon the nature of man
+and of God, and the origin of creation; the Ideas of Plato, for
+instance, the Numbers of Pythagoras, the theurgic extravagances of
+Plotinus and Porphyry and Iamblichus; and then measure the contributions
+made by the scholastic theologians, whose dry method has undergone so
+much severe condemnation, to the instruments by which knowledge is
+enlarged and made accurate. It was the Church, moreover, which
+civilised the Northern barbarians, and so preserved the West f<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>rom the
+same barbarism and desolation with which the triumphs of Mahometanism
+replaced the knowledge and arts and prosperity of the East. It is to the
+services of the Church that we owe the perpetuation of a knowledge of
+the ancient tongues, and if this knowledge, and the possession of the
+masterpieces of thought and feeling and form, the flower of the ancient
+European mind, remained so long unproductive, still religious
+organisation deserves our gratitude equally for keeping these great
+treasures for happier times. They survived, as trees stripped by winter
+of their leaves survive through frost and storm, to give new blossoms in
+a new spring.</p>
+
+<p>This much on the intellectual side; but how can we describe the moral
+transformation which the new faith brought to pass? Men who had hitherto
+only regarded gods as beings to be entreated to avert ill or bestow
+blessing, now learnt the nobler emotion of devout love for a divinity of
+supreme power and beneficence. The new faith, besides kindling love for
+God, inflamed the kindred sentiment of love for men, all of whom it
+declared to be the children of God, one vast family with a common
+father. Julian himself bore witness to the fidelity with which the
+Christians, whose faith he hated or despised, tended the sick and fed
+the poor, not only of their own association, but those also who were
+without the fold. The horrible practice of exposing new-born infants,
+which outraged nature, and yet did not touch the heart nor the
+understanding of a Numa, an Aristotle, a Confucius, was first <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>proscribed
+by the holy religion of Christ. If shame and misery still sometimes, in
+the hearts of poor outcast mothers, overpower the horror which
+Christianity first inspired, it is still the same religion which has
+opened sheltering places for the unhappy victims of such a practice, and
+provided means for rearing foundlings into useful citizens.</p>
+
+<p>Christian teaching, by reviving the principles of sensibility within the
+breast, may be said 'to have in some sort unveiled human nature to
+herself.' If the cruelty of old manners has abated, do we not owe the
+improvement to such courageous priests as Ambrose, who refused admission
+into the church to Theodosius, because in punishing a guilty city he had
+hearkened to the voice rather of wrath than of justice; or as that Pope
+who insisted that Lewis the Seventh should expiate by a rigorous penance
+the sack and burning of Vitry.<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a> It is not to a Titus, a Trajanus, an
+Antoninus, that we owe the abolition of the bloody gladiatorial games;
+it is to Jesus Christ. Virtuous unbelievers have not seldom been the
+apostles of benevolence and humanity, but we rarely see them in the
+asylums of misery. Reason speaks, but it is religion that makes men act.
+How much dearer to us than the splendid monuments of antique taste,
+power, and greatness, are those Gothic edifices reared for the poor and
+the orphan, those far nobler monuments of the piety of Christian
+princes and the power of Christian faith. The rudeness of their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+architecture may wound the delicacy of our taste, but they will be ever
+beloved by feeling hearts. 'Let others admire in the retreat prepared
+for those who have sacrificed in battle their lives or their health for
+the State, all the gathered riches of the arts, displaying in the eyes
+of all the nations the magnificence of Lewis the Fourteenth, and
+carrying our renown to the level of that of Greece and Rome. What I will
+admire is such a use of those arts; the sublime glory of serving the
+weal of men raises them higher than they had ever been at Rome or at
+Athens.'</p>
+
+<p>2. Let us turn from the action of the Christian faith in modifying the
+passions of the individual, to its influence upon societies of men. How
+has Christianity ameliorated the great art of government, with reference
+to the two characteristic aims of that art, the happiness of
+communities, and their stability? 'Nature has given all men the right of
+being happy,' but the old lawgivers abandoned nature's wise economy, by
+which she uses the desires and interests of individuals to fulfil her
+general plans and ensure the common weal. Men like Lycurgus destroyed
+all idea of property, violated the laws of modesty, and annihilated the
+tenderest ties of blood. A false and mischievous spirit of system
+seduced them away from the true method, the feeling after
+experience.<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> A general injustice reigned in the laws of all nations;
+among all of them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> what was called the public good was confined to a
+small number of men. Love of country was less the love of
+fellow-citizens than a common hatred towards strangers. Hence the
+barbarities practised by the ancients upon their slaves, hence that
+custom of slavery once spread over the whole earth, those horrible
+cruelties in the wars of the Greeks and the Romans, that barbarous
+inequality between the two sexes which still reigns in the East; hence
+the tyranny of the great towards the common people in hereditary
+aristocracies, the profound degradation of subject peoples. In short,
+everywhere the stronger have made the laws and have crushed the weak;
+and if they have sometimes consulted the interests of a given society,
+they have always forgotten those of the human race. To recall right and
+justice, a principle was necessary that could raise men above themselves
+and all around them, that could lead them to survey all nations and all
+conditions with an equitable gaze, and in some sort with the eyes of God
+himself. This is what religion has done. What other principle could have
+fought and vanquished both interests and prejudice united?</p>
+
+<p>Nothing but the Christian religion could have worked that general
+revolution in men's minds, which brought the rights of humanity out into
+full day, and reconciled an affectionate preference for the community of
+which one makes a part, with a general love for mankind. Even the
+horrors of war were softened, and humanity began to be spared such
+frightful sequels of triumph,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> as towns burnt to ashes, populations put
+to the sword, the wounded massacred in cold blood, or reserved to give a
+ghastly decoration to triumph. Slavery, where it was not abolished, was
+constantly and effectively mitigated by Christian sentiment, and the
+fact that the Church did not peremptorily insist on its universal
+abolition was due to a wise reluctance to expose the constitution of
+society to so sudden and violent a shock. Christianity without formal
+precepts, merely by inspiring a love of justice and mercy in men's
+hearts, prevented the laws from becoming an instrument of oppression,
+and held a balance between the strong and the feeble.</p>
+
+<p>If the history of the ancient republics shows that they hardly knew the
+difference between liberty and anarchy, and if even the profound
+Aristotle seemed unable to reconcile monarchy with a mild government, is
+not the reason to be found in the fact that before the Christian era,
+the various governments of the world only presented either an ambition
+without bound or limit, or else a blind passion for independence? a
+perpetual balance between oppression on the one side, and revolt on the
+other? In vain did lawgivers attempt to arrest this incessant struggle
+of conflicting passions by laws which were too weak for the purpose,
+because they were in too imperfect an accord with opinions and manners.
+Religion, by placing man under the eyes of an all-seeing God, imposed on
+human passions the only rein capable of effectually bridling them. It
+gave men internal laws, that were stronger than all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> the external bonds
+of the civil laws. By means of this internal change, it has everywhere
+had the effect of weakening despotism, so that the limits of
+Christianity seem to mark also the limits of mild government and public
+felicity. Kings saw the supreme tribunal of a God who should judge them
+and the cause of their people. Thus the distance between them and their
+subjects became as nothing in the infinite distance between kings and
+subjects alike, and the divinity that was equally elevated above either.
+They were both in some sort equalised by a common abasement. 'Ye
+nations, be subject to authority,' cried the voice of religion to the
+one; and to the other it cried, 'Ye kings, who judge the earth, learn
+that God has only entrusted you with the image of power for the
+happiness of your peoples.'</p>
+
+<p>An eloquent description of the efficacy of Christianity in raising human
+nature, and impressing on kings the obligation of pursuing above all
+things the wellbeing of their subjects, closes with a courtly official
+salutation of the virtues of that Very Christian King, Lewis the
+Fifteenth.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>'It is ill reasoning against religion,' an illustrious contemporary of
+Turgot's had said, in a deprecatory sentence that serves to mark the
+spirit of the time; 'to compile a long list of the evils which it has
+inflicted, without doing the same for the blessings which it has
+bestowed.'<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> Conversely we may well think it unphilosophical a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>nd
+unconvincing to enumerate all the blessings without any of the evils; to
+tell us how the Christian doctrine enlarged the human spirit, without
+observing what narrowing limitations it imposed; to dwell on all the
+mitigating influences with which the Christian churches have been
+associated, while forgetting all the ferocities which they have
+inspired. The history of European belief offers a double record since
+the decay of polytheism, and if for a certain number of centuries this
+record shows the civilisation of men's instincts by Christianity, it
+reveals to us in the centuries subsequent, the reverse process of the
+civilisation of Christianity by men's instincts. Turgot's piece treats
+half the subject as if it were the whole. He extends down to the middle
+of the eighteenth century a number of propositions and implied
+inferences, which are only true up to the beginning of the fourteenth.</p>
+
+<p>Even within this limitation there are many questions that no student of
+Turgot's capacity would now overlook, yet of which he and the most
+reasonable spirits of his age took no cognisance. The men of neither
+side in the eighteenth century knew what the history of opinion meant.
+All alike concerned themselves with its truth or falsehood, with what
+they counted to be its abstract fitness or unfitness. A perfect method
+places a man where he can command one point of view as well as the
+other, and can discern not only how far an idea is true and convenient,
+but also how, whet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>her true and convenient or otherwise, it came into its
+place in men's minds. We ought to be able to separate in thought the
+question of the grounds and evidence for a given dogma being true, from
+the distinct and purely historic question of the social and intellectual
+conditions which made men accept it for true.</p>
+
+<p>Where, however, there was any question of the two religions whose
+document and standards are professedly drawn from the Bible, there the
+Frenchmen of that time assumed not a historic attitude, but one
+exclusively dogmatic. Everybody was so anxious to prove, that he had
+neither freedom nor humour to observe. The controversy as to the exact
+measure of the supernatural force in Judaism and its Christian
+development was so overwhelmingly absorbing, as to leave without light
+or explanation the wide and independent region of their place as simply
+natural forces. It may be said, and perhaps it is true, that people
+never allow the latter side of the inquiry to become prominent in their
+minds until they have settled the former, and settled it in one way:
+they must be indifferent to the details of the natural operations of a
+religion, until they are convinced that there are none of any other
+kind. Be this as it may, we have to record the facts. And it is
+difficult to imagine a Frenchman of the era of the Encyclop&aelig;dia asking
+himself the sort of questions which now present themselves to the
+student in such abundance. For instance, has one effect of Christianity
+been to exalt a regard for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> Sympathetic over the &AElig;sthetic side of
+action and character? And if so, to what elements in the forms of
+Christian teaching and practice is this due? And is such a transfer of
+the highest place from the beauty to the lovableness of conduct to be
+accounted a gain, when contrasted with the relative position of the two
+sides among the Greeks and Romans?</p>
+
+<p>Again, we have to draw a distinction between the Christian idea and the
+outward Christian organisation, and between the consequences to human
+nature and society which flowed from the first, and the advantages which
+may be traced to the second. There was on the one hand a doctrine,
+stirring dormant spiritual instincts, and satisfying active spiritual
+needs; on the other an external institution, preserving, interpreting,
+developing, and applying the doctrine. Each of the two has its own
+origin, its own history, its own destiny in the memories of the race. We
+may attempt to estimate the functions of the one, without pronouncing on
+the exact value of the other. If the idea was the direct gift of heaven,
+the policy was due to the sagacity and mother-wit of the great
+ecclesiastical statesmen. If the doctrine was a supernatural boon, at
+least the forms in which it came gradually to overspread Europe were to
+be explained on rational and natural grounds. And if historical
+investigation of these forms and their influences should prove that they
+are the recognisable roots of most of the benign growths which are
+vaguely styled results of Christianity, then such a conclusion would
+serious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>ly attenuate the merits of the supernatural Christian doctrine in
+favour of the human Christian policy.</p>
+
+<p>If there had been in the Christian idea the mysterious self-sowing
+quality so constantly claimed for it, how came it that in the Eastern
+part of the Empire it was as powerless for spiritual or moral
+regeneration as it was for political health and vitality, while in the
+Western part it became the organ of the most important of all the past
+transformations of the civilised world? Is not the difference to be
+explained by the difference in the surrounding medium, and what is the
+effect of such an explanation upon the supernatural claims of the
+Christian idea? Does such an explanation reduce that idea to the rank of
+one of the historic forces, which arise and operate and expand
+themselves in accordance with strictly natural conditions? The
+Christianity of the East was probably as degraded a form of belief, as
+lowering for human character, and as mischievous to social wellbeing, as
+has ever been held by civilised peoples. Yet the East, strangely enough,
+was the great home and nursery of all that is most distinctive in the
+constituent ideas of the Christian faith. Why, in meditating on
+Christianity, are we to shut our eyes to the depravation that overtook
+it when placed amid unfavourable social conditions, and to confine our
+gaze to the brighter qualities which it developed in the healthier
+atmosphere of the West?</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p>
+<p>Further, Turgot might have asked with much profit to the cause of
+historic truth, and perhaps in more emancipated years he did ask,
+whether economic circumstances have not had more to do with the
+dissolution of slavery than Christian doctrines:&mdash;whether the rise of
+rent from free tenants over the profits to be drawn from slave-labour by
+the landowner, has not been a more powerful stimulant to emancipation,
+than the moral maxim that we ought to love one another, or the Christian
+proposition that we are all equals before the divine throne and co-heirs
+of salvation:&mdash;whether a steady and permanent fall in the price of
+slave-raised productions had not as much to do with the decay of slavery
+in Europe, as the love of God or the doctrine of human brotherhood.<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a>
+That the influence of Christianity, so far as it went, and, so far as it
+was a real power, tended both to abolish slavery, and, where it was too
+feeble to press in this direction, at any rate tended to mitigate the
+harshness of its usages, is hardly to be denied by any fair-minded
+person. The true issue is what this influence amounted to. The orthodox
+historian treats it as single and omnipotent. His heterodox brother&mdash;in
+the eighteenth century they both usually belonged to one family&mdash;leaves
+it out.</p>
+
+<p>The crowded annals of human misology, as well as the more terrible
+chronicle of the consequences when misology has impatiently betaken
+itself to the cruel arm of flesh, show the decisive importance of the
+precise way in whic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>h a great subject of debate is put. Now the whole
+question of religion was in those days put with radical incompleteness,
+and Turgot's dissertation was only in a harmony that might have been
+expected with the prevailing error. The champions of authority, like the
+leaders of the revolt, insisted on inquiring absolutely, not relatively;
+on judging religion with reference to human nature in the abstract,
+instead of with reference to the changing varieties of social
+institution and circumstance. We ought to place ourselves where we can
+see both lines of inquiry to be possible. We ought to place ourselves
+where we can ask what the tendencies of Christian influence have been,
+without mixing up with that question the further and distinct inquiry
+what these tendencies are now, or are likely to be. The nineteenth
+century has hitherto leaned to the historical and relative aspect of the
+great controversy. The eighteenth was characteristically dogmatic, and
+the destroyers of the faith were not any less dogmatic in their own way,
+than those who professed to be its apologists.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Probably it was not long after the composition of this apologetic
+thesis, before Turgot became alive to the precise position of a creed
+which had come to demand apologetic theses. This was, indeed, one of the
+marked and critical moments in the great transformation of religious
+feeling and ecclesiastical order in Europe, of which our own age, four
+generations later, is watching a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> very decisive, if not a final stage.
+Turgot's demonstration of the beneficence of Christianity was delivered
+in July 1750&mdash;almost the exact middle of the eighteenth century. The
+death of the Emperor Charles the Sixth, ten years before, had given the
+signal for the break-up of the European system. The iron army of Prussia
+made its first stride out of the narrow northern borders, into the broad
+arena of the West, and every new illustration of the fortitude and depth
+and far-reaching power of Prussia has been a new blow to the old
+Catholic organisation. The first act of this prodigious drama closed
+while Turgot was a pupil at the Sorbonne. The court of France had
+blundered into alliances against the retrograde and Catholic house of
+Austria, while England, with equal blindness, had stumbled into
+friendship with it. Before the opening of the second act or true
+climax&mdash;that is, before the Seven Years' War began&mdash;interests and forces
+became more naturally adjusted. France, Spain, and Austria, Bourbons and
+Hapsburgs, the great pillars of the Church, were ranged against England
+and Prussia, the half-conscious representatives of those industrial and
+individualist principles which replaced, whether for a time or
+permanently, the decaying system of aristocratic caste in temporal
+things, and an ungrowing Catholicism in things spiritual. In 1750
+ecclesiastical far-sightedness, court intrigue, and family ambitions,
+were actively preparing the way for the Austrian alliance in the
+mephitic air of Versailles. The issue at stake was the maintenan<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>ce of
+the supremacy of the Church, and the ancient Christian organisation of
+France and of Europe.</p>
+
+<p>We now know how this long battle has gone. The Jesuit Churchmen lost
+their lead, and were thrown back out of the civil and political sphere.
+We know, too, what effect these blows to the Catholic organisation have
+had upon the activity of the Catholic idea. With the decline and
+extermination of the predominance of Churchmen in civil affairs, there
+began a tendency, which has since become deeper and stronger, in the
+Church to withdraw herself and her sons from a sphere where she could no
+longer be sovereign and queen. Religion, since the Revolution, isolates
+the most devout Catholics from political action and political interests.
+This great change, however, this return of the leaders of the Christian
+society upon the original conceptions of the Christian faith, did not
+come to pass in Turgot's time. He watched the struggle of the Church for
+the maintenance of its temporal privilege and honour, and for the
+continued protection by secular power of its spiritual supremacy. The
+outcome of the struggle was later.</p>
+
+<p>We may say, in fine, that if this first public composition of Turgot's
+is extremely imperfect, it was better to exaggerate the services of
+Christianity, alike as an internal faith and as a peculiar form of
+social organisation, than to describe Gregory the Great and Innocent,
+Hildebrand and Bernard, as artful and vulgar tyrants, and Aquinas and
+Roger Bacon as the products of a pure<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>ly barbarous, stationary, and dark
+age. There is at first sight something surprising in the respect which
+Turgot's ablest contemporaries paid to the contributions made to
+progress by Greece and Rome, compared with their angry disparagement of
+the dark ages. The reason of this contrast we soon discover to be that
+the passions of present contests gave their own colour to men's
+interpretation of the circumstances of the remote middle time, between
+the Roman Empire and the commencement of the revolutionary period.
+Turgot escaped these passions more completely than any man of his time
+who was noble enough to be endowed with the capacity for passion. He
+never forgot that it is as wise and just to confess the obligations of
+mankind to the Catholic monotheism of the West, as it is shallow and
+unjust in professors of Christianity to despise or hate the lower
+theological systems which guide the humbler families of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Let us observe that only three years after this academic discourse in
+praise of the religion of the time, Turgot was declaring that 'the
+greatest of the services of Christianity to the world was that it had
+both enlightened and propagated <i>natural religion</i>.'<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Turgot's inquiry into the extent and quality of the debt of European
+civilisation to Christianity was marked by a certain breadth and
+largeness, in spite of the bonds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> of circumstance and subject&mdash;for who,
+after all, can consider Christianity to any purpose, apart from other
+conditions of general progress, or without free comparison with other
+dogmatic systems? It is not surprising, then, to find the same valuable
+gifts of vision coming into play with a thousand times greater liberty
+and power, when the theme was widened so as to comprehend the successive
+steps of the advancement of the human mind in all its aspects. The
+Second and more famous of the two Discourses at the Sorbonne was read in
+December 1750, and professes to treat the Successive Advances of the
+Human Mind.<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> The opening lines are among the most pregnant, as they
+were among the most original, in the history of literature, and reveal
+in an outline, standing clear against the light, a thought which
+revolutionised old methods of viewing and describing the course of human
+affairs, and contained the germs of a new and most fruitful philosophy
+of society.</p>
+
+<p>'The phenomena of nature, subjected as they are to constant laws, are
+enclosed in a circle of revolutions that remain the same for ever. All
+comes to life again, all perishes again; and in these successive
+generations, by which vegetables and animals reproduce themselves, time
+does no more than bring back at each moment the image of what it has
+just dismissed.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span></p>
+<p>'The succession of men, on the contrary, offers from age to age a
+spectacle of continual variations. Reason, freedom, the passions, are
+incessantly producing new events. <i>All epochs are fastened together by a
+sequence of causes and effects, linking the condition of the world to
+all the conditions that have gone before it.</i> The gradually multiplied
+signs of speech and writing, giving men an instrument for making sure of
+the continued possession of their ideas, as well as of imparting them to
+others, have formed out of the knowledge of each individual a common
+treasure, which generation transmits to generation, as an inheritance
+constantly augmented by the discoveries of each age; and the human race,
+observed from its first beginning, seems in the eyes of the philosopher
+to be one vast whole, which, like each individual in it, has its infancy
+and its growth.'</p>
+
+<p>This was not a mere casual reflection in Turgot's mind, taking a
+solitary and separate position among those various and unordered ideas,
+which spring up and go on existing without visible fruit in every active
+intelligence. It was one of the systematic conceptions which shape and
+rule many groups of facts, fixing a new and high place of their own for
+them among the great divisions of knowledge. In a word, it belonged to
+the rare order of truly creative ideas, and was the root or germ of a
+whole body of vigorous and connected thought. This quality marks the
+distinction, in respect of the treatment of history, between Turgot, and
+both Bossuet and the great writers of history in France and England in
+the eighteenth century. Ma<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>ny of the sayings to which we are referred for
+the origin of the modern idea of history, such as Pascal's for instance,
+are the fortuitous glimpses of men of genius into a vast sea, whose
+extent they have not been led to suspect, and which only make a passing
+and momentary mark. Bossuet's talk of universal history, which has been
+so constantly praised, was fundamentally, and in substance, no more than
+a bit of theological commonplace splendidly decorated. He did indeed
+speak of 'the concatenation of human affairs,' but only in the same
+sentence with 'the sequence of the counsels of God.' The gorgeous
+rhetorician of the Church was not likely to rise philosophically into
+the larger air of universal history, properly so called. His famous
+Discourse is a vindication of divine foresight, by means of an intensely
+narrow survey of such sets of facts as might be thought not inconsistent
+with the deity's fixed purpose to make one final and decisive revelation
+to men. No one who looks upon the vast assemblage of stupendous human
+circumstances, from the first origin of man upon the earth, as merely
+the ordained antecedent of what, seen from the long procession of all
+the ages, figures in so diminutive a consummation as the Catholic
+Church, is likely to obtain a very effective hold of that broad sequence
+and many-linked chain of events, to which Bossuet gave a right name, but
+whose real meaning he never was even near seizing. His merit is that he
+did in a small and rhetorical way what Montesquieu and Voltaire
+afterwards did in a truly compreh<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>ensive and philosophical way; he
+pressed forward general ideas in connection with the recorded movements
+of the chief races of mankind. For a teacher of history to leave the
+bare chronicler's road so far as to declare, for example, the general
+principle, inadequate and over-stated as it is, that 'religion and civil
+government are the two points on which human things revolve,'&mdash;even this
+was a clear step in advance. The dismissal of the long series of
+emperors from Augustus to Alexander Severus in two or three pages was to
+show a ripe sense of large historic proportion. Again, Bossuet's
+expressions of 'the concatenation of the universe,' of the
+interdependence of the parts of so vast a whole, of there coming no
+great change without having its causes in foregoing centuries, and of
+the true object of history being to observe, in connection with each
+epoch, those secret dispositions of events which prepared the way for
+great changes, as well as the momentous conjunctures which more
+immediately brought them to pass<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a>&mdash;all these phrases seem to point to
+a true and philosophic survey. But they end in themselves, and lead
+nowhither. The chain is an arbitrary and one-sided collection of facts.
+The writer does not cautiously follow and feel after the successive
+links, but forges and chooses and arrays them after a pattern of his
+own, which was fixed independently of them. A scientific term or two is
+not enough to disguise the purely theological essence of the treatise.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span></p>
+<p>Montesquieu and Voltaire were both far enough removed from Bossuet's
+point of view, and the <i>Spirit of Laws</i> of the one, and the <i>Essay on
+the Manners and Character of Nations</i> of the other, mark a very
+different way of considering history from the lofty and confident method
+of the orthodox rhetorician. The <i>Spirit of Laws</i> was published in 1748,
+that is to say a couple of years before Turgot's Discourse at the
+Sorbonne. Voltaire's <i>Essay on Manners</i> did not come out until 1757, or
+seven years later than the Discourse; but Voltaire himself has told us
+that its composition dates from 1740, when he prepared this new
+presentation of European history for the service of Madame du
+Ch&acirc;telet.<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a> We may hence fairly consider the cardinal work of
+Montesquieu, and the cardinal historical work of Voltaire, as virtually
+belonging to the same time. And they possess a leading character in
+common, which separates them both from Turgot, and places them
+relatively to his idea in a secondary rank. In a word, Montesquieu and
+Voltaire, if we have to search their most distinctive quality,
+introduced into history systematically, and with full and decisive
+effect, a broad generality of treatment. They grouped the facts of
+history; and they did not group them locally or in accordance with mere
+geographical or chronological division, but collected the facts in
+social classes and orders from many countries and times. Their work was
+a work of classification. It showed the possibility of arrangi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>ng the
+manifold and complex facts of society, and of the movements of
+communities, under heads and with reference to definite general
+conditions.</p>
+
+<p>There is no need here to enter into any criticism of Montesquieu's great
+work, how far the merits of its execution equalled the merit of its
+design, how far his vicious confusion of the senses of the word 'law'
+impaired the worth of his book, as a contribution to inductive or
+comparative history. We have only to seek the difference between the
+philosophic conception of Montesquieu and the philosophic conception of
+Turgot. The latter may be considered a more liberal completion of the
+former. Turgot not only sees the operation of law in the movements and
+institutions of society, but he interprets this law in a positive and
+scientific sense, as an ascertainable succession of social states, each
+of them being the cause and effect of other social states. Turgot gives
+its deserved prominence to the fertile idea of there being an ordered
+movement of growth or advance among societies; in other words, of the
+civilisation of any given portion of mankind having fixed conditions
+analogous to those of a physical organism. Finally, he does not limit
+his thought by fixing it upon the laws and constitutions only of
+countries, but refers historical philosophy to its veritable and widest
+object and concern, the steps and conditions of the progression of the
+human mind.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p>
+<p>How, he inquires, can we seize the thread of the progress of the human
+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.'</p>
+
+<p>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-in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>creasing 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>, 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.'</p>
+
+<p>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. '<i>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.</i> Every object in
+nature had its god, and this god formed after the pattern of men, had
+men's attributes and men's vices.'<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a> Here, in anthropomorphism, or <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+lumi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>naries that burn and sparkle of themselves, at least they are like
+diamonds that reflect with dazzling brilliance a borrowed light.'</p>
+
+<p>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.'</p>
+
+<p>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 favourabl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>e 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 thei<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>r fellows.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> 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,&mdash;their law in a word,&mdash;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?</p>
+
+<p>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 furthe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>r 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.<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.'<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> 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 ca<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>use 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV.</h2>
+
+
+<p>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 G<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>enerality, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 m<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>isery 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>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 <span class="smcap">XIV</span>. 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,&mdash;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 P&eacute;rigord
+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 al<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>l 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 V&eacute;z&egrave;re, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 re<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>sidence. 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. <i>'Poor peasants, poor kingdom!'</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Turgot was one of the men to whom good government is a religion. It
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> 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 d&eacute;bris 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 <i>justice alone can keep the balance true among all rights
+and all interests</i>.' Let us proceed to watch this principle actively
+applied in a field where it was grievously needed.</p>
+
+<p>As everybody knows, the great fiscal grievance of old France was the
+<i>taille</i>, 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 <i>taille</i>, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> 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 <i>taille</i>, 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
+<i>taille</i>. 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 t<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>he 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.</p>
+
+<p>Let us proceed to another of the master abuses of the old system. The
+introduction of the <i>Corv&eacute;e</i>, 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 <i>corv&eacute;es</i> 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 <i>corv&eacute;e</i>
+analogous to that of private feudalism. Few more mischievous imposts
+could have been devised.</p>
+
+<p>That undying class who are contented with the shallow presumptions of <i>&agrave;
+priori</i> reasoning in economic matters, did, it is true, find specious
+pleas even for the road <i>corv&eacute;e</i>. There has never been an abuse in the
+history of the wor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>ld, 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
+<i>corv&eacute;e</i>, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>. 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.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span></p>
+<p>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 <i>corv&eacute;e</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>corv&eacute;e</i> 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 <i>taille</i>. 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 the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>m by far the noblest public ways to be
+found anywhere in France.</p>
+
+<p>Two very instructive facts may be mentioned in connection with the
+suppression of the <i>corv&eacute;es</i> 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 <i>taille</i> in commutation of the work
+on the roads, he was not able to force a contribution, either to the
+<i>taille</i> 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 si<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>de, and by intense political
+distrust on the other side.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class="smcap">XVI.</span>, 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, how<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>ever 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 cur&eacute;s 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 cur&eacute;s, 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 Fre<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>derick 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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The <i>corv&eacute;e</i>, 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
+sch<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>oolmaster, 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
+r&eacute;gime 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 ba<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>d 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 <i>milice</i> supplied as bad troops as the <i>corv&eacute;e</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 o<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>ne 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 <i>corv&eacute;es</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>taille</i> had
+also to collect the twentieths, and the twentieths we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>re 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.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from these, the greatest and most difficult of all Turgot's
+administrative reforms, we may notice in passing his assiduity in
+watching for the smaller opportunities of making life easier to the
+people of his province. His private benevolence was incessant and
+marked. One case of its exercise carries our minds at a word into the
+very midst of the storm of fire which purified France of the evil and
+sordid elements, that now and for his life lay like a mountain of lead
+on all Turgot's aims and efforts. A certain foreign contractor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> at
+Limoges was ruined by the famine of 1770. He had a clever son, whom
+Turgot charitably sent to school, and afterwards to college in Paris.
+The youth grew up to be the most eloquent and dazzling of the Girondins,
+the high-souled Vergniaud. It was not, however, in good works of merely
+private destination that Turgot mostly exercised himself. In 1767 the
+district was infested by wolves. The Intendant imposed a small tax for
+the purpose of providing rewards for the destruction of these
+tormentors, and in reading the minutes on the subject we are reminded of
+the fact, which was not without its significance when the peasants rose
+in vengeance on their lords two and twenty years later, that the
+dispersion of the hamlets and the solitude of the farms had made it
+customary for the people to go about with fire-arms. Besides encouraging
+the destruction of noxious beasts, Turgot did something for the
+preservation of beasts not noxious. The first veterinary school in
+France had been founded at Lyons in 1762. To this he sent pupils from
+his province, and eventually he founded a similar school at Limoges. He
+suppressed a tax on cattle, which acted prejudicially on breeding and
+grazing; and he introduced clover into the grass-lands. The potato had
+been unknown in Limousin. It was not common in any part of France; and
+perhaps this is not astonishing when we remember that the first field
+crop even in agricultural Scotland is supposed only to have been sown in
+the fourth decade of that century. People would not touch it, though
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> experiment of persuading them to cultivate this root had been
+frequently tried. In the Limousin the people were even more obstinate in
+their prejudice than elsewhere. But Turgot persevered, knowing how
+useful potatoes would be in a land where scarcity of grain was so
+common. The ordinary view was that they were hardly fit for pigs, and
+that in human beings they would certainly breed leprosy. Some of the
+English Puritans would not eat potatoes because they are not mentioned
+in the Bible, and that is perhaps no better a reason than the other.
+When, however, it was seen that the Intendant had the hated vegetable
+served every day at his own table, the opposition grew more faint; men
+were at last brought to consent to use potatoes for their cattle, and
+after a time even for themselves.</p>
+
+<p>It need scarcely be said that among Turgot's efforts for agricultural
+improvement, was the foundation of an agricultural society. This was the
+time when the passion for provincial academies of all sorts was at its
+height. When we consider that Turgot's society was not practical but
+deliberative, and what themes he proposed for discussion by it, we may
+believe that it was one of the less useful of his works. What the
+farmers needed was something much more directly instructive in the
+methods of their business, than could come of discussions as to the
+effects of indirect taxation on the revenues of landowners, or the right
+manner of valuing the income of land in the different kinds of
+cultivation. 'In that most unlucky path of French exertion,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>' says Arthur
+Young, 'this distinguished patriot was able to do nothing. This society
+does like other societies; they meet, converse, offer premiums, and
+publish nonsense. This is not of much consequence, for the people
+instead of reading their memoirs are not able to read at all. They can,
+however, <i>see</i>, and if a farm was established in that good cultivation
+which they ought to copy, something would be presented from which they
+<i>might</i> learn. I asked particularly if the members of this society had
+land in their own hands, and was assured that they had; but the
+conversation presently explained it. They had <i>m&eacute;tayers</i> round their
+country seats, and this was considered as farming their own lands, so
+that they assume something of a merit from the identical circumstance,
+which is the curse and ruin of the whole country.'</p>
+
+<p>The record of what Turgot did for manufacturing industry and commerce is
+naturally shorter than that of his efforts for the relief of the land
+and its cultivators. In the eyes of the modern economist, with his
+horror of government encouragement to industry, no matter in what time,
+place, or circumstance, some of Turgot's actions will seem of doubtful
+wisdom. At Brives, for example, with all the authority of an Intendant,
+he urged the citizens to provide buildings for carrying on a certain
+manufacture which he and others thought would be profitable to the town;
+and, as the money for the buildings did not come in very readily, he
+levied a rate both on the town and on the inhabitants of the subu<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>rbs.
+His argument was that the new works would prove indirectly beneficial to
+the whole neighbourhood. He was not long, however, in finding out, as
+the authors of such a policy generally find out, how difficult it is to
+reconcile the interests of aided manufactures with those of the
+taxpayers. It is characteristic, we may remark, of the want of public
+spirit in the great nobles, that one of Turgot's first difficulties in
+the affair was to defeat an unjust claim made by no less a personage
+than the Marshal de Noailles, to a piece of public land on which the
+proposed works were to be built. A more important industry in the
+history of Limoges sprang from the discovery, during Turgot's tenure of
+office, of the china clay which has now made the porcelain of Limoges
+only second among the French potteries to that of S&egrave;vres itself. The
+modern pottery has been developed since the close of the Revolution,
+which checked the establishments and processes that had been directed,
+encouraged, and supervised by Turgot.</p>
+
+<p>To his superior enlightenment in another part of the commercial field we
+owe one of the most excellent of Turgot's pieces, his Memorial on Loans
+of Money. This plea for free trade in money has all the sense and
+liberality of the brightest side of the eighteenth century illumination.
+It was suggested by the following circumstance. At Angoul&ecirc;me four or
+five rogues associated together, and drew bills on one another. On these
+bills they borrowed money, the average rate of interest being from
+eight to ten per cent. When the bills fell <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>due, instead of paying them,
+they laid informations against the lenders for taking more than the
+legal rate of interest. The lenders were ruined, persons who had money
+were afraid to make advances, bills were protested, commercial credit
+was broken, and the trade of the district was paralysed. Turgot
+prevailed upon the Council of State to withdraw the cases from the local
+jurisdiction; the proceedings against the lenders were annulled, and the
+institution of similar proceedings forbidden. This was a characteristic
+course. The royal government was generally willing in the latter half of
+the eighteenth century to redress a given case of abuse, but it never
+felt itself strong enough, or had leisure enough, to deal with the
+general source from which the particular grievance sprang. Turgot's
+Memorial is as cogent an exposure of the mischief of Usury Laws to the
+public prosperity, as the more renowned pages either of Bentham or J. B.
+Say on the same subject, and it has the merit of containing an
+explanation at once singularly patient and singularly intelligent, of
+the origin of the popular feeling about usury and its adoption by the
+legislator.</p>
+
+<p>After he had been eight years at his post, Turgot was called upon to
+deal with the harassing problems of a scarcity of food. In 1770 even the
+maize and black grain, and the chestnuts on which the people supported
+life, failed almost completely, and the failure extended over two years.
+The scarcity very speedily threatened to become a famine, and all its
+conditions were exasperated by the unwisdom of the authorities, and the
+selfish ra<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>pacity of the landlords. It needed all the firmness and all
+the circumspection of which Turgot was capable, to overcome the
+difficulties which the strong forces of ignorance, prejudice, and
+greediness raised up against him.</p>
+
+<p>His first battle was on an issue which is painfully familiar to our own
+Indian administrators at the present time. In 1764, an edict had been
+promulgated decreeing free trade in grain, not with foreign countries,
+but among the different provinces of the kingdom. This edict had not
+made much way in the minds either of the local officials or of the
+people at large, and the presence of famine made the free and
+unregulated export of food seem no better than a cruel and outrageous
+paradox. The parlement of Bordeaux at once suspended the edict of 1764.
+They ordered that all dealers in grain, farmers of land, owners of land,
+of whatever rank, quality, or condition, should forthwith convey to the
+markets of their district <i>'a sufficient quantity'</i> of grain to
+provision the said markets. The same persons were forbidden to sell
+either by wholesale or retail any portion of the said grain at their own
+granaries. Turgot at once procured from the Council at Versailles the
+proper instrument for checking this impolitic interference with the free
+circulation of grain, and he contrived this instrument in such
+conciliatory terms as to avoid any breach with the parlement, whose
+motives, for that matter, were respectable enough. In spite, however,
+of the action of the government, popular feeling ran high agains<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>t free
+markets. Tumultuous gatherings of famishing men and women menaced the
+unfortunate grain-dealers. Waggoners engaged in carrying grain away from
+a place where it was cheaper, to another place where it was dearer, were
+violently arrested in their business, and terrified from proceeding.
+Hunger prevented people from discerning the unanswerable force of the
+argument that if the grain commanded a higher price somewhere else, that
+was a sure sign of the need there being more dire. The local officials
+were as hostile as their humbler neighbours. At the town of Turenne,
+they forbade grain to be taken away, and forced the owners of it to sell
+it on the spot at the market rate. At the town of Angoul&ecirc;me the
+lieutenant of police took upon himself to order that all the grain
+destined for the Limousin should be unloaded and stored at Angoul&ecirc;me.
+Turgot brought a heavy hand to bear on these breakers of administrative
+discipline, and readily procured such sanction as his authority needed
+from the Council.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most interesting of the measures to which Turgot resorted in
+meeting the destitution of the country, was the establishment of the
+Charitable Workshops. Some of the advocates of the famous National
+Workshops of 1848 have appealed to this example of the severe patriot,
+for a sanction to their own economic policy. It is not clear that the
+logic of the Socialist is here more remorseless than usual. If the State
+may set up workshops to aid people who are short of food because the
+harvest has failed, why should it not <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>do the same when people are short
+of food because trade is bad, work scarce, and wages intolerably low? Of
+course Turgot's answer would have been that remorseless logic is the
+most improper instrument in the world for a business of rough
+expedients, such as government is. There is a vital difference in
+practice between opening a public workshop in the exceptional emergency
+of a famine, and keeping public workshops open as a normal interference
+with the free course of industrial activity. For the moment the
+principle may appear to be the same, but in reality the application of
+the principle means in the latter case the total disorganisation of
+industry; in the former it means no more than a temporary breach of the
+existing principles of organisation, with a view to its speedier
+revival. To invoke Turgot as a dabbler in Socialism because he opened
+<i>ateliers de charit&eacute;</i>, is as unreasonable as it would be to make an
+English minister who should suspend the Bank Charter Act in a crisis,
+into the champion of an inconvertible paper currency. Turgot always
+regarded the sums paid in his works, not as wages, but as alms. All that
+he urged was that 'the best and most useful kind of alms consists in
+providing means for earning them.' To prevent the workers from earning
+aid with as little trouble to themselves as possible, he recommended
+payment by the piece and not by the day. To check workers from flocking
+in from their regular employments, he insisted on the wages being kept
+below the ordinary rate, and he urged the propriety of driving as shar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>p
+bargains as possible in fixing the price of the piece of work. To
+prevent the dissipation of earnings at the tavern, he paid not in money,
+but in leathern tokens, that were only current in exchange for
+provisions. All these regulations mark a wide gulf between the Economist
+of 1770 and the Socialist of 1848. Nobody was sterner than Turgot
+against beggars, the inevitable scourge of every country where the evils
+of vicious economic arrangements are aggravated by the mischievous views
+of the Catholic clergy, first, as to the duties of promiscuous
+almsgiving, and second, as to the virtue of improvident marriages. In
+1614 the States General had been for hanging all mendicants, and Colbert
+had sent them to the galleys. Turgot was less rigorous than that, but he
+would not suffer his efforts for the economic restoration of his
+province to be thwarted by the influx of these devouring parasites, and
+he sent every beggar on whom hands could be laid to prison.</p>
+
+<p>The story of the famine in the Limousin brings to light some instructive
+facts as to the temper of the lords and rich proprietors on the eve of
+the changes that were to destroy them. Turgot had been specially anxious
+that as much as possible of what was necessary for the relief of
+distress should be done by private persons. He knew the straits of the
+government. He knew how hard it would be to extract from it the means of
+repairing a deficit in his own finances. Accordingly he invited the
+landowners, not merely to contribute sums of money in return for the
+public works carried o<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>n in their neighbourhood, but also, by way of
+providing employment to their indigent neighbours, to undertake such
+works as they should find convenient on their own estates. The response
+was disappointing. 'The districts,' he wrote in 1772, 'where I have
+works on foot, do not give me reason to hope for much help on the side
+of the generosity of the nobles and the rich landowners. The Prince de
+Soubise is so far the only person who has given anything for the works
+that have been executed in his duchy.' Nor was abstinence from
+generosity the worst part of this failure in public spirit. The same
+nobles and landowners who refused to give, did not refuse to take away.
+Most of them proceeded at once to dismiss their <i>m&eacute;tayers</i>, the people
+who farmed their lands in consideration of a fixed proportion of the
+produce. Turgot, in an ordinance of admirable gravity, remonstrated
+against this harsh and impolitic proceeding. He pointed out that the
+unfortunate wretches, thus stripped of every resource, would have to
+leave the district, abandoning their wives and children to the charity
+of villages that were already overburdened with the charge of their own
+people. To cast this additional load on the villages was all the more
+unjust, because the owners of land had been exempted from one-half of
+the taxes levied on the owners of other property, exactly because the
+former were expected to provide for their own peasants. It was a claim
+less of humanity than of bare justice, that the landowners should do
+something for men with whom their relations<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> had been so close as to be
+almost domestic, and to whose hard toil their masters owed all that they
+possessed. As a mere matter of self-interest, moreover, apart alike from
+both justice and humanity, the death or flight of the labourers would
+leave the proprietors helpless when the next good season came, and for
+want of hands the land would be doomed to barrenness for years to come,
+to the grievous detriment no less of the landowners than of the whole
+people of the realm. Accordingly, Turgot ordered all those who had
+dismissed their <i>m&eacute;tayers</i> to take them back again, and he enacted
+generally that all proprietors, of whatever quality or condition, and
+whether privileged or not, should be bound to keep and support until the
+next harvest all the labourers who had been on their land in the
+previous October, as well women and children as men.</p>
+
+<p>Turgot's policy in this matter is more instructive as to the social
+state of France, than it may at first sight appear. At first sight we
+are astonished to find the austere economist travelling so far from the
+orthodox path of free contract as to order a landowner to furnish at his
+own cost subsistence for his impoverished tenants. But the truth is that
+the <i>m&eacute;tayer</i> was not a free tenant in the sense which we attach to the
+word. '<i>In Limousin</i>,' says Arthur Young, '<i>the m&eacute;tayers are considered
+as little better than menial servants</i>.' And it is not going beyond the
+evidence to say that they were even something lower than menial
+servants; they were really a kind of serf-caste. They lived in the
+lowest mi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>sery. More than half of them were computed to be deeply in debt
+to the proprietors. In many cases they were even reduced every year to
+borrow from their landlord, before the harvest came round, such coarse
+bread of mixed rye and barley as he might choose to lend them. What
+Turgot therefore had in his mind was no relation of free contract,
+though it was that legally, but a relation which partly resembled that
+of a feudal lord to his retainer, and partly&mdash;as Sir Henry Maine has
+hinted&mdash;that of a planter to his negroes. It is less surprising, then,
+that Turgot should have enforced some of the responsibilities of the
+lord and the planter.</p>
+
+<p>The nobles had resort to a still more indefensible measure than the
+expulsion of their <i>m&eacute;tayers</i>. Most of the lands in the Generality of
+Limoges were charged with dues in kind payable to the lords. As the
+cultivators had for the most part no grain even for their own bread,
+they naturally had no grain for the lord's dues. The lords then insisted
+on payment in cash, and they insisted on estimating this payment at the
+famine price of the grain. Most of them were really as needy as they
+were idle and proud, and nothing is so inordinately grasping as the
+indigence of class-pride. The effect of their proceedings now was to
+increase their revenue fourfold and fivefold out of public calamity and
+universal misery. And unfortunately the liability of the cultivators in
+a given manor was <i>solidaire</i>; they were jointly and severally
+responsible, and the effect of this was that even those who were in
+circum<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>stances to pay the quadrupled dues, were ruined and destroyed
+without mercy in consequence of having also to pay the quadrupled dues
+of their beggared neighbours. Turgot arrested this odious process by
+means of an old and forgotten decree, which he prevailed upon the
+parlement of Bordeaux to revive in good and due form, to the effect that
+the arrears of dues in kind for 1769 should be paid at the market price
+of grain when the dues were payable; that is, before the scarcity had
+declared itself.</p>
+
+<p>When we consider the grinding and extortionate spirit thus shown in face
+of a common calamity, we may cease to wonder at the ferocity with which,
+when the hour struck, the people tore away privilege, distinction, and
+property itself from classes that had used all three only to ruin the
+land and crush its inhabitants into the dust. And the moment that the
+lord had thus transformed himself into a mere creditor, and a creditor
+for goods delivered centuries ago, and long since consumed and
+forgotten, then it was certain that, if political circumstances favoured
+the growing economic sentiment, there would be heard again the old cry
+of the Roman plebs for an agrarian law and <i>nov&aelig; tabul&aelig;</i>. Nay, something
+was heard that is amazingly like the cry of the modern Irish peasant. In
+1776 two noteworthy incidents happened. A certain Marquis de Vibraye
+threw into prison a peasant who refused to pay the <i>droit de cens</i>.
+Immediately between thirty and forty peasants came to the rescue, armed
+themselves,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> besieged the ch&acirc;teau, took it and sacked it, and drove the
+Marquis de Vibraye away in terror. Still more significant is the second
+incident, which happened shortly after. A relative of the Duke of
+Mortemart, shooting on his property, was attacked by peasants who
+insisted that he should cease his sport. They treated him with much
+brutality, and even threatened to fire on him and his attendants,
+'<i>claiming to be free masters of their lands</i>.' Here was the main root
+of the great French Revolution. A fair consideration of the details of
+such an undertaking as Turgot's administration of the Limousin helps us
+to understand two things: first, that all the ideas necessary for the
+pacific transformation of French society were there in the midst of it;
+second, that the system of privilege had fostered such a spirit in one
+class, and the reaction against the inconsiderate manifestation of that
+spirit was so violent in the other class, that good political ideas were
+vain and inapplicable.</p>
+
+<p>It is curious to find that, in the midst of his beneficent
+administration, Turgot was rating practical work very low in comparison
+with the achievements of the student and the thinker. 'You are very
+fortunate,' Condorcet said to him, 'in having a passion for the public
+good, and in being able to satisfy it; it is a great consolation, and of
+a very superior order to the consolation of mere study.' 'Nay,' replied
+Turgot, in his next letter, 'whatever you may say, I believe that the
+satisfaction derived from study is superior to any o<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>ther kind of
+satisfaction. I am perfectly convinced that one may be, through study, a
+thousand times more useful to men than in any of our subordinate posts.
+There we torment ourselves, and often without any compensating success,
+to secure some small benefits, while we are the involuntary instrument
+of evils that are by no means small. All our small benefits are
+transitory, while the light that a man of letters is able to diffuse
+must, sooner or later, destroy all the artificial evils of the human
+race, and place it in a position to enjoy all the goods that nature
+offers.' It is clear that we can only accept Turgot's preference, on
+condition that the man of letters is engaged on work that seriously
+advances social interests and adds something to human stature. Most
+literature, nearly all literature, is distinctly subordinate and
+secondary; it only serves to pass the time of the learned or cultured
+class, without making any definite mark either on the mental habits of
+men and women, or on the institutions under which they live. Compared
+with such literature as this, the work of an administrator who makes
+life materially easier and more hopeful to the half-million of persons
+living in the Generality of Limoges or elsewhere, must be pronounced
+emphatically the worthier and more justly satisfactory.<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a></p>
+
+<p>Turgot himself, however, found time, in his industry at Limoges, to make
+a contribution to a kind of literature which has seriously modified the
+practical arrangements a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>nd social relations of the western world. In
+1766 he published his Essay on the Formation and Distribution of
+Wealth&mdash;a short but most pithy treatise, in which he anticipated some of
+the leading economic principles of that greater work by Adam Smith,
+which was given to the world ten years later. Turgot's Essay has none of
+the breadth of historic outlook, and none of the amplitude of concrete
+illustrations from real affairs, which make the Wealth of Nations so
+deeply fertile, so persuasive, so interesting, so thoroughly alive, so
+genuinely enriching to the understanding of the judicious reader. But
+the comparative dryness of Turgot's too concise form does not blind the
+historian of political economy to the merit of the substance of his
+propositions. It was no small proof of originality and enlightenment to
+precede Adam Smith by ten years in the doctrines of free trade, of free
+industry, of loans on interest, of the constitutive elements of price,
+of the effects of the division of labour, of the processes of the
+formation of capital. The passage on interest will bear reproducing once
+more:&mdash;'We may regard the rate of interest as a kind of level, below
+which all labour, all cultivation, all industry, all commerce ceases. It
+is like a sea spreading out over a vast district; the tops of the
+mountains rise above the waters and form fertile and cultivated islands.
+If the sea by any chance finds an outlet, then in proportion as it goes
+down, first the slopes, next the plains and valleys, appear and clothe
+themselves with productions of every kind. It is eno<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>ugh that the sea
+rises or falls by a foot, to inundate vast shores, or to restore them to
+cultivation and plenty.' There are not many illustrations at once so apt
+and so picturesque as this, but most of the hundred paragraphs that make
+up the Reflections are, notwithstanding one or two of the characteristic
+crotchets of Quesnai's school, both accurate and luminous.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In May 1774 Lewis <span class="smcap">XV</span>. died. His successor was only twenty years old; he
+was sluggish in mind, vacillating in temper, and inexperienced in
+affairs. Maurepas was recalled, to become the new king's chief adviser;
+and Maurepas, at the suggestion of one of Turgot's college friends,
+summoned the Intendant from Limoges, and placed him at the head of the
+department of marine. This post Turgot only held for a couple of months;
+he was then preferred to the great office of Controller-General. The
+condition of the national finance made its administration the most
+important of all the departments of the government. Turgot's policy in
+this high sphere belongs to the general history of France, and there is
+no occasion for us to reproduce its details here. It was mainly an
+attempt to extend over the whole realm the kind of reforms which had
+been tried on a small scale in the Limousin. He suppressed the
+<i>corv&eacute;es</i>, and he tacked the money payment which was substituted for
+that burden on to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>Twentieths, an impost from which the privileged
+class was not exempt. 'The weight of this charge,' he made the king say
+in the edict of suppression, 'now falls and must fall only on the
+poorest classes of our subjects.' This truth only added to the
+exasperation of the rich, and perhaps might well have been omitted.
+Along with the <i>corv&eacute;es</i> were suppressed the jurandes, or exclusive
+industrial corporations or trade-guilds, whose monopolies and
+restrictions were so mischievous an impediment to the wellbeing of the
+country. In the preamble to this edict we seem to be breathing the air,
+not of Versailles in 1775, but of the Convention in 1793:&mdash;'God, when he
+made man with wants, and rendered labour an indispensable resource, made
+the right of work the property of every individual in the world, and
+this property is the first, the most sacred, and the most
+imprescriptible of all kinds of property. We regard it as one of the
+first duties of our justice, and as one of the acts most of all worthy
+of our benevolence, to free our subjects from every infraction of that
+inalienable right of humanity.'</p>
+
+<p>Again, Turgot removed a tax from certain forms of lease, with a view to
+promote the substitution of a system of farming for the system of
+<i>m&eacute;tayers</i>. He abolished an obstructive privilege by which the H&ocirc;tel
+Dieu had the exclusive right of selling meat during Lent. The whole of
+the old incoherent and vexatious police of the corn-markets was swept
+away. Finally, he inspired the publication of a short but most
+important writ<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>ing, Boncerf's <i>Inconv&eacute;nients des Droits F&eacute;odaux</i>, in
+which, without criticising the origin of the privileges of the nobles,
+the author showed how much it would be to the advantage of the lords to
+accept a commutation of their feudal dues. What was still more
+exasperating both to nobles and lawyers, was the author's hardy
+assertion that if the lords refused the offer of their vassals, the king
+had the power to settle the question for them by his own legislative
+authority. This was the most important and decisive of the
+pre-revolutionary tracts.</p>
+
+<p>Equally violent prejudices and more sensitive interests were touched by
+two other sets of proposals. The minister began to talk of a new
+territorial contribution, and a great survey and re-assessment of the
+land. Then followed an edict restoring in good earnest the free
+circulation of corn within the kingdom. Turgot was a partisan of free
+trade in its most entire application; but for the moment he contented
+himself with the free importation of grain and its free circulation at
+home, without sanctioning its exportation abroad. Apart from changes
+thus organically affecting the industry of the country, Turgot dealt
+sternly with certain corruptions that had crept into the system of
+tax-farming, as well as with the monstrous abuses of the system of
+court-pensions.</p>
+
+<p>The measures we have enumerated were all excellent in themselves, and
+the state of the kingdom was such as urgently to call for them. They
+were steps towards the construction of a fabric of freedom and justice.
+But they p<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>rovoked a host of bitter and irreconcilable enemies, while
+they raised up no corresponding host of energetic supporters. The reason
+of the first of these circumstances is plain enough, but the second
+demands a moment's consideration. That the country clergy should
+denounce the Philosopher, as they called him, from the pulpit and the
+steps of the altar, was natural enough. Many even of his old colleagues
+of the Encyclop&aelig;dia had joined Necker against the minister. The greatest
+of them all, it is true, stood by Turgot with unfailing staunchness; a
+shower of odes, diatribes, dialogues, allegories, dissertations, came
+from the Patriarch of Ferney to confound and scatter the enemies of the
+new reforms. But the people were unmoved. If Turgot published an
+explanation of the high price of grain, they perversely took explanation
+for gratulation, and thought the Controller preferred to have bread
+dear. If he put down seditious risings with a strong hand, they insisted
+that he was in nefarious league with the corn-merchants and the bakers.
+How was it that the people did not recognise the hand of a benefactor?
+The answer is that they suspected the source of the new reforms too
+virulently to judge them calmly. For half a century, as Condorcet says
+pregnantly, they had been undergoing the evils of anarchy, while they
+supposed that they were feeling those of despotism. The error was grave,
+but it was natural, and one effect of it was to make every measure that
+proceeded from the court odious. Hence, when the parlements took up
+their jud<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>icial arms in defence of abuses and against reforms, the common
+people took sides with them, for no better reason than that this was to
+take sides against the king's government. Malesherbes in those days, and
+good writers since, held that the only safe plan was to convoke the
+States-General. They would at least have shared the responsibility with
+the crown. Turgot rejected this opinion. By doctrine, no less than by
+temperament, he disliked the control of a government by popular bodies.
+Everything for the people, nothing by the people: this was the maxim of
+the Economists, and Turgot held it in all its rigour. The royal
+authority was the only instrument that he could bring himself to use.
+Even if he could have counted on a Frederick or a Napoleon, the
+instrument would hardly have served his purposes; as things were, it was
+a broken reed, not a fine sword, that he had to his hand.</p>
+
+<p>The National Assembly and the Convention went to work exactly in the
+same stiff and absolute spirit as Turgot. They were just as little
+disposed to gradual, moderate, and compromising ways as he. But with
+them the absolute authority on which they leaned was real and most
+potent; with him it was a shadow. We owe it to Turgot that the
+experiment was complete: he proved that the monarchy of divine right was
+incapable of reform.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> As it has been sententiously expressed, 'The
+part of the sages was now played out; room was now for the men of
+destiny.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If the repudiation of a popular assembly was the cardinal error in
+Turgot's scheme of policy, there were other errors added. The
+publication of Boncerf's attack on the feudal dues, with the undisguised
+sanction of the minister, has been justly condemned as a grave
+imprudence, and as involving a forgetfulness of the true principles of
+government and administration, that would certainly not have been
+committed either by Colbert, in whom Turgot professed to seek his model,
+nor by Gournai, who had been his master. It was a broad promise of
+reforms which Turgot was by no means sure of being able to persuade the
+king and his council to adopt. By prematurely divulging his projects, it
+augmented the number of his adversaries, without being definite enough
+to bring new friends.<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> Again, Turgot did nothing to redeem it by
+personal conciliatoriness in carrying out the designs of a benevolent
+absolutism. The Count of Provence, afterwards Lewis <span class="smcap">XVIII.</span>, wrote a
+satire on the government during Turgot's ministry, and in it there is a
+picture of the great reformer as he appeared to his enemies: 'There was
+then in France an awkward, heavy, clumsy creature; born with more
+rudeness than character, more obstinacy than firmness, more impetuosity
+than tact; a charlatan in administration no less than in virtue, exactly
+formed to get the one decried and to disgust the world with the other;
+made harsh and distan<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>t by his self-love, and timid by his pride; as much
+a stranger to men, whom he had never known, as to the public weal, which
+he had never seen aright; this man was called Turgot.'</p>
+
+<p>It is a mistake to take the word of political adversaries for a man's
+character, but adversaries sometimes only say out aloud what is already
+suspected by friends. The coarse account given by the Count of Provence
+shows us where Turgot's weakness as a ruler may have lain. He was
+distant and stiff in manner, and encouraged no one to approach him. Even
+his health went against him, for at a critical time in his short
+ministry he was confined to bed by gout for four months, and he could
+see nobody save clerks and secretaries. The very austerity, loftiness,
+and purity, which make him so reverend and inspiring a figure in the
+pages of the noble-hearted Condorcet, may well have been impediments in
+dealing with a society that, in the fatal words of the Roman historian,
+could bear neither its disorders nor their remedies.</p>
+
+<p>The king had once said pathetically: 'It is only M. Turgot and I who
+love the people.' But even with the king, there were points at which the
+minister's philosophic severity strained their concord. Turgot was the
+friend of Voltaire and Condorcet; he counted Christianity a form of
+superstition; and he, who as a youth had refused to go through life
+wearing the mask of the infidel abb&eacute;, had too much self-respect in his
+manhood to practise the rites and uses of a system which he considered
+a degradation of the understanding. One day the king sai<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>d to Maurepas:
+'You have given me a Controller-general who never goes to mass.' 'Sire,'
+replied that ready worldling, 'the Abb&eacute; Terray always went'&mdash;and Terray
+had brought the government to bankruptcy. But Turgot hurt the king's
+conscience more directly than by staying away from mass and confession.
+Faithful to the long tradition of his ancestors, Lewis <span class="smcap">XVI.</span> wished the
+ceremony of his coronation to take place at Rheims. Turgot urged that it
+should be performed at Paris, and as cheaply as possible. And he
+advanced on to still more delicate ground. In the rite of consecration,
+the usage was that the king should take an oath to pursue all heretics.
+Turgot demanded the suppression of this declaration of intolerance. It
+was pointed out to him that it was only a formality. But Turgot was one
+of those severe and scrupulous souls, to whom a wicked promise does not
+cease to be degrading by becoming hypocritical. And he was perfectly
+justified. It was only by the gradual extinction of the vestiges of her
+ancient barbarisms, as occasion offered, that the Church could have
+escaped the crash of the Revolution. Meanwhile, the king and the priests
+had their own way: the king was crowned at Rheims, and the priests
+exacted from him an oath to be unjust, oppressive, and cruel towards a
+portion of his subjects. Turgot could only remonstrate; but the
+philosophic memorial in which he protested in favour of religious
+freedom and equality, gave the king a serious shock.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p>
+<p>We have no space, nor would it be worth while, to describe the intrigues
+which ended in the minister's fall. Already in the previous volume, we
+have referred to the immediate and decisive share which, the queen had
+in his disgrace.<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> He was dismissed in the beginning of May 1776,
+having been in power little more than twenty months. 'You are too
+hurried,' Malesherbes had said to him. 'You think you have the love of
+the public good; not at all; you have a rage for it, for a man must be
+nothing short of enraged to insist on forcing the hand of the whole
+world.' Turgot replied, more pathetically perhaps than reasonably,
+'What, you accuse me of haste, and you know that in my family we die of
+gout at fifty!'</p>
+
+<p>There is something almost tragic in the joy with which Turgot's
+dismissal was received on all sides. 'I seem,' said Marmontel, 'to be
+looking at a band of brigands in the forest of Bondy, who have just
+heard that the provost-marshal has been discharged.' Voltaire and
+Condorcet were not more dismayed by the fall of the minister, than by
+the insensate delight which greeted the catastrophe. 'This event,' wrote
+Condorcet, 'has changed all nature in my eyes. I have no longer the same
+pleasure in looking at those fair landscapes over which he would have
+shed happiness and contentment. The sight of the gaiety of the people
+wrings my heart. They dance and sport, as if they had lost nothing. Ah,
+we have had a delicious dream, but it has been all too short.' Voltaire
+was equally inconsolable, and still more violent in the expression of
+his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> grief. When he had become somewhat calmer, he composed those
+admirable verses,&mdash;<i>To a Man:</i></p>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">Philosophe indulgent, ministre citoyen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Qui ne cherchas le vrai que pour faire le bien,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Qui d'un peuple l&eacute;ger et trop ingrat peut-&ecirc;tre<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Pr&eacute;parais le bonheur et celui de son ma&icirc;tre,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Ce qu'on nomme disgrace a pay&eacute; tes bienfaits.<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Le vrai prix de travail n'est que de vivre en paix.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p>Turgot at first showed some just and natural resentment at the levity
+with which he had been banished from power, and he put on no airs of
+theatrical philosophy. He would have been untrue to the sincerity of his
+character, if he had affected indifference or satisfaction at seeing his
+beneficent hopes for ever destroyed. But chagrin did not numb his
+industry or his wide interests. Condorcet went to visit him some months
+after his fall. He describes Turgot as reading Ariosto, as making
+experiments in physics, and as having forgotten all that had passed
+within the last two years, save when the sight of evils that he would
+have mitigated or removed, happened to remind him of it. He occupied
+himself busily with chemistry and optics, with astronomy and mechanics,
+and above all with meteorology, which was a new science in those days,
+and the value of which to the study of the conditions of human health,
+of the productions of the earth, of naviga<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>tion, excited his most ardent
+anticipations. Turgot also was so moved by the necessity for a new
+synthesis of life and knowledge as to frame a plan for a great work 'on
+the human soul, the order of the universe, the Supreme Being, the
+principles of societies, the rights of men, political constitutions,
+legislation, administration, physical education, the means of perfecting
+the human race relatively to the progressive advance and employment of
+their forces, to the happiness of which they are susceptible, to the
+extent of the knowledge to which they may attain, to the certainty,
+clearness, and simplicity of the principles of conduct, to the purity of
+the feelings that spring up in men's souls.' While his mind was moving
+through these immense spaces of thought, he did not forget the things of
+the hour. He invented a machine for serving ship's cables. He wrote a
+plea for allowing Captain Cook's vessel to remain unmolested during the
+American war. With Adam Smith, with Dr. Price, with Franklin, with Hume,
+he kept up a grave and worthy correspondence. Of his own countrymen,
+Condorcet was his most faithful friend and disciple, and it is much to
+Condorcet's credit that this was so, for Turgot never gave way to the
+passionate impulses of the philosophic school against what Voltaire
+called the Infamous, that is to say, against the Church, her doctrines,
+her morality, her history.</p>
+
+<p>We have already said that the keyword to Turgot's political aims and
+social theory was not Pity nor Benevolence, but Justice. It was Justice
+also, not temporary Prejudice nor Pass<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>ion, that guided his judgment
+through the heated issues of the time. This justice and exact
+reasonableness it was impossible to surprise or throw off its guard. His
+sublime intellectual probity never suffered itself to be tempted. He
+protested against the doctrines of Helv&eacute;tius's book, <i>de l'Esprit</i>, and
+of D'Holbach's <i>Syst&egrave;me de la Nature</i>, at a moment when some of his best
+friends were enthusiastic in admiration, for no better reason than that
+the doctrines of the two books were hateful to the ecclesiastics and
+destructive of the teaching of the Church. In the course of a
+discussion, Condorcet had maintained that in general scrupulous persons
+are not fit for great things: a Christian, he said, will waste in
+subduing the darts of the flesh time that he might have employed upon
+things that would have been useful to humanity; he will never venture to
+rise against tyrants, for fear of having formed a hasty judgment, and so
+forth in other cases. 'No virtue,' replies Turgot, 'in whatever sense
+you take the word, can dispense with justice; and I think no better of
+the people who do your <i>great things</i> at the cost of justice, than I do
+of poets who fancy that they can produce great wonders of imagination
+without order and regularity. I know that excessive precision tends to
+deaden the fire alike of action and of composition; but there is a
+medium in everything. There has never been any question in our
+controversy of a capuchin wasting his time in quenching the darts of the
+flesh, though, by the way, in the whole sum of time wasted, the term
+expressi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>ng the time lost in satisfying the appetites of the flesh would
+probably be found to be decidedly the greater of the two.' This
+parenthesis is one of a hundred illustrations of Turgot's habitual
+refusal to be carried out of the narrow path of exact rationality, or to
+take for granted a single word of the common form of the dialect even of
+his best friends and closest associates. And the readiness with which
+men fall into common form, the levity with which they settle the most
+complex and difficult issues, stirred in Turgot what Michelet calls
+<i>f&eacute;rocit&eacute;</i>, and Mr. Matthew Arnold calls <i>s&#339;va indignatio</i>. 'Turgot
+was filled with an astonished, awful, oppressive sense of the <i>immoral
+thoughtlessness</i> of men; of the heedless, hazardous way in which they
+deal with things of the greatest moment to them; of the immense,
+incalculable misery which is due to this cause' (<i>M. Arnold</i>).</p>
+
+<p>Turgot died on the 20th of March 1781, leaving to posterity the memory
+of a character which was more perfect and imposing than his
+performances. Condorcet saw in this harmonious union and fine balance of
+qualities the secret of his unpopularity. 'Envy,' he says, 'seems more
+closely to attend a character that approaches perfection, than one that,
+while astonishing men by its greatness, yet by exhibiting a mixture of
+defects and vices, offers a consolation that envy seeks.'</p>
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Born in 1743, 1749, and 1759 respectively.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Among others, of a little volume still to be met with in
+libraries, <i>Sur la mani&egrave;re de pr&eacute;parer les diverses curiosit&eacute;s
+d'histoire naturelle</i> (1758).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Vie de Turgot</i>, p. 8 (ed. 1847).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> <i>M&eacute;moires de Morellet</i>, i. 12 (ed. 1822).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Lettre &agrave; Madame de Graffigny. <i>&#338;uv.</i> ii. 793.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Letter to Turgot, <i>&#338;uv. de Condorcet</i>, i. 228. See also
+vi. 264, and 523-526.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Morellet, i. 133.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Whewell's <i>Hist. Induct. Sciences</i>, ii. 147-159.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv. de Turgot</i>, ii. 783. (Edition of Messrs. Eug&egrave;ne
+Daire and H. Dussard, published in the <i>Collection des Principaux
+Economistes</i>, published by Guillaumin, 1844.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> <i>M&eacute;moires</i>, i. 16.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> i. 20.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> i. 19.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> Morellet's <i>M&eacute;moires</i>, i. 17-21; 262-270; and ii. 15.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> Marmontel's <i>M&eacute;moires</i>, bk. xiii.; Morellet, however, with
+persevering friendliness, denies the truth of Marmontel's picture (ii.
+465).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> Morellet, i. 21.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> Dupont de Nemours. Condorcet's <i>Vie de Turgot</i>, pp. 8-10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> 'La n&eacute;cessit&eacute; de mentir pour d&eacute;savouer un ouvrage est une
+extr&eacute;mit&eacute; qui r&eacute;pugne &eacute;galement &agrave; la conscience et &agrave; la noblesse du
+caract&egrave;re; mais le crime est pour les hommes injustes qui rendent ce
+d&eacute;saveu n&eacute;cessaire &agrave; la s&ucirc;ret&eacute; de celui qu'ils y forcent. Si vous avez
+&eacute;rig&eacute; en crime ce qui n'en est pas un, si vous avez port&eacute; atteinte, par
+des lois absurdes ou par des lois arbitraires, au droit naturel qu'ont
+tous les hommes, non seulement d'avoir une opinion, mais de la rendre
+publique, alors vous m&eacute;ritez de perdre celui qu'a chaque homme
+d'entendre la v&eacute;rit&eacute; de la bouche d'un autre, droit qui fonde seule
+l'obligation rigoureuse de ne pas mentir.'&mdash;Condorcet, <i>Vie de Voltaire</i>
+(<i>&#338;uv.</i> iv. 33, 34).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv.</i> ii. 685. Morellet says that it was written by
+Lom&eacute;nie de Brienne, 19.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> See the note of Dupont de Nemours, <i>ad loc.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> See Condorcet's &eacute;loge on Buffon (<i>&#338;uv.</i> iii. 335); and
+a passage from Bourdon, quoted in Whewell's <i>Hist. Induct. Sci.</i> iii.
+348.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> October, 1748. <i>&#338;uv.</i> ii. 782-784.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> Condorcet's <i>Vie de Turgot</i>, 14.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> Morellet, i. 140.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> Written in 1751. <i>&#338;uv.</i> ii. 785-794.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> 'On sera surpris que je compte l'&eacute;tude des langues au
+nombre des inutilit&eacute;s de l'&eacute;ducation,' etc.&mdash;<i>Emile</i>, bk. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> See Locke, <i>Of Education</i>, &sect;&sect; 81, 184, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> 'La seule le&ccedil;on de morale qui convienne &agrave; l'enfance, et la
+plus importante &agrave; tout &acirc;ge, est de ne jamais faire de mal &agrave; personne,'
+etc. <i>Emile</i>, bk. ii. 'Never trouble yourself about these faults in
+them, which you know age will cure. And therefore want of well-fashioned
+civility in the carriage ... should be the parents' least care while
+they are young. If his tender mind be filled with a veneration for his
+parents and teachers, which consists in love and esteem and a fear to
+offend them; and with respect and good-will to all people; that respect
+will of itself teach these ways of expressing it, which he observes most
+acceptable,' etc.&mdash;Locke, <i>Of Education</i>, &sect;&sect; 63, 67, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> 'Vous donnez la science, &agrave; la bonne heure; moi je m'occupe
+de l'instrument propre &agrave; l'acqu&eacute;rir,' etc.&mdash;<i>Emile.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> ii. 790.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv. de Condorcet</i>, vi. 245.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv.</i> ii. 672.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv.</i> ii. 586, <i>n.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> See Martin's <i>Hist. de la France</i>, iii. 422. Or Morison's
+<i>Life of Saint Bernard</i>, bk. iii. ch. vi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> <i>Les hommes en tout ne s'&eacute;clairent que par le t&acirc;tonnement
+de l'exp&eacute;rience.</i> P. 593.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> <i>Esprit des Lois</i>, bk. xxiv. ch. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> See on this subject Finlay's <i>Medi&aelig;val Greece and
+Trebizond</i>, p. 197; and also, on the other hand, p. 56.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> <i>Lettres sur la Tol&eacute;rance</i>, II. vol. ii. 687.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> Sur les progr&eacute;s successifs de l'esprit humain. <i>&#338;uv.</i>
+ii. 597-611.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> <i>Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle</i>, part iii. ch. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> Preface to <i>Essai sur les M&#339;urs</i>, <i>&#338;uv.</i> xx.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> P. 601.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> P. 603.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> <i>Study of History</i>, Letter ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> See vol. i. p. 290.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> Foncin's <i>Minist&egrave;re de Turgot</i>, p. 574.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> See Mauguin's <i>Etudes Historiques sur l'Administration de
+l'Agriculture</i>, i. 353.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> See vol. i. p. 31.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Transcribers' Notes:</p>
+
+<p>Minor printer errors (omitted or incorrect punctuation) have been
+amended without note. Minor inconsistencies in hyphenation have been
+resolved where possible, or retained where there was no way to determine
+which was correct, again without note. Other errors have been amended,
+and are listed below.</p>
+
+
+<p>List of Amendments:</p>
+
+<p>Page 50&mdash;superstitution amended to superstition&mdash;"... treated as
+superstition by those ..."</p>
+
+<p>Page 126&mdash;devolopment amended to development&mdash;"... lead gradually to the
+development of sound ..."</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3), by John Morley
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+</body>
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+Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3), by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3)
+       Turgot
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: October 3, 2007 [EBook #22865]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TURGOT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Rene Anderson Benitz and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CRITICAL MISCELLANIES
+
+
+by
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+
+VOL. II.
+
+Essay 2: Turgot
+
+
+
+
+
+
+London
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+New York: The MacMillan Company
+1905
+
+
+
+
+TURGOT.
+
+
+I.
+                                                         PAGE
+
+Birth and family descent                                  41
+
+His youth at the Sorbonne                                 47
+
+Intellectual training                                     52
+
+His college friends: Morellet, and Lomenie de Brienne     54
+
+Turgot refused to become an ecclesiastic                  56
+
+His revolt against dominant sophisms of the time          60
+
+Letter to Buffon                                          61
+
+Precocity of his intellect                                65
+
+Letter to Madame de Graffigny                             65
+
+Illustrates the influence of Locke                        69
+
+Views on marriage                                         72
+
+On the controversy opened by Rousseau                     72
+
+Turgot's power of grave suspense                          76
+
+
+II.
+
+First Discourse at the Sorbonne                           78
+
+Analysis of its contents                                  80
+
+Criticisms upon it                                        86
+
+It is one-sided                                           87
+
+And not truly historic                                    88
+
+Fails to distinguish doctrine from organisation           89
+
+Omits the Christianity of the East                        90
+
+And economic conditions                                   92
+
+The contemporary position of the Church in Europe         93
+
+
+III.
+
+Second Discourse at the Sorbonne                          96
+
+Its pregnant thesis of social causation                   97
+
+Compared with the thesis of Bossuet                       99
+
+And of Montesquieu                                       100
+
+Analysis of the Second Discourse                         102
+
+Characteristic of Turgot's idea of Progress              106
+
+Its limitation                                           108
+
+Great merit of the Discourse, that it recognises
+ordered succession                                       110
+
+
+IV.
+
+Turgot appointed Intendant of the Limousin               111
+
+Functions of an Intendant                                112
+
+Account of the Limousin                                  114
+
+Turgot's passion for good government                     118
+
+He attempts to deal with the _Taille_                      119
+
+The road _Corvee_                                          121
+
+Turgot's endeavours to enlighten opinion                 126
+
+Military service                                         129
+
+   "     transport                                       131
+
+The collection of taxes                                  132
+
+Turgot's private benevolence                             133
+
+Introduces the potato                                    134
+
+Founds an academy                                        135
+
+Encourages manufacturing industry                        136
+
+Enlightened views on Usury                               137
+
+Has to deal with a scarcity                              138
+
+His plans                                                139
+
+Instructive facts connected with this famine             142
+
+Turgot's Reflections on the Formation and
+Distribution of Wealth                                   149
+
+
+V.
+
+Turgot made Controller-General                           150
+
+His reforms                                              151
+
+Their reception                                          153
+
+His unpopularity                                         156
+
+Difficulties with the king                               157
+
+His dismissal                                            158
+
+His pursuits in retirement                               159
+
+Conclusion                                               162
+
+
+
+
+TURGOT.
+
+I.
+
+
+Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot was born in Paris on the 10th of May 1727. He
+died in 1781. His life covered rather more than half a century,
+extending, if we may put it a little roughly, over the middle fifty
+years of the eighteenth century. This middle period marks the exact date
+of the decisive and immediate preparation for the Revolution. At its
+beginning neither the intellectual nor the social elements of the great
+disruption had distinctly appeared, or commenced their fermentation. At
+its close their work was completed, and we may count the months thence
+until the overthrow of every institution in France. It was between 1727
+and 1781 that the true revolution took place. The events from '89 were
+only finishing strokes, the final explosion of a fabric under which
+every yard had been mined, by the long endeavour for half a century of
+an army of destroyers deliberate and involuntary, direct and oblique,
+such as the world has never at any other time beheld.
+
+In 1727 Voltaire was returning from his exile in England, to open the
+long campaign, of which he was from that time forth to the close of his
+days the brilliant and indomitable captain. He died in 1778, bright,
+resolute, humane, energetic, to the last. Thus Turgot's life was almost
+exactly contemporary with the pregnant era of Voltaire's activity. In
+the same spring in which Turgot died, Maurepas too came to his end, and
+Necker was dismissed. The last event was the signal at which the floods
+of the deluge fairly began to rise, and the revolutionary tide to swell.
+
+It will be observed, moreover, that Turgot was born half a generation
+after the first race of the speculative revolutionists. Rousseau,
+Diderot, Helvetius, Condillac, D'Alembert, as well as the foreign Hume,
+so much the greatest of the whole band of innovators, because
+penetrating so much nearer to the depths, all came into the world which
+they were to confuse so unspeakably, in the half dozen years between
+1711 and 1717. Turgot was of later stock and comes midway between these
+fathers of the new church, between Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, and the
+generation of its fiery practical apostles, Condorcet, Mirabeau,
+Robespierre.[1] The only other illustrious European of this decade was
+Adam Smith, who was born in 1723, and between whose labours and some of
+the most remarkable of Turgot's there was so much community. We cannot
+tell how far the gulf between Turgot and the earlier band was fixed by
+the accident that he did not belong to their generation in point of
+time. The accident is in itself only worth calling attention to, in
+connection with his distance from them in other and more important
+points than time.
+
+[Footnote 1: Born in 1743, 1749, and 1759 respectively.]
+
+The years of Turgot exactly bridge the interval between the ministry of
+the infamous Dubois and the ministry of the inglorious Calonne; between
+the despair and confusion of the close of the regency, and the despair
+and confusion of the last ten years of the monarchy. In 1727 we stand on
+the threshold of that far-resounding fiery workshop, where a hundred
+hands wrought the cunning implements and Cyclopean engines that were to
+serve in storming the hated citadels of superstition and injustice. In
+1781 we emerge from these subterranean realms into the open air, to find
+ourselves surrounded by all the sounds and portents of imminent ruin.
+This, then, is the significance of the date of Turgot's birth.
+
+       *     *     *     *     *
+
+His stock was Norman, and those who amuse themselves by finding a vital
+condition of the highest ability in antiquity of blood, may quote the
+descent of Turgot in support of their delusion. His biographers speak of
+one Togut, a Danish Prince, who walked the earth some thousand years
+before the Christian era; and of Saint Turgot in the eleventh century,
+the Prior of Durham, biographer of Bede, and first minister of Malcolm
+III. of Scotland. We shall do well not to linger in this too dark and
+frigid air. Let us pass over Togut and Saint Turgot; and the founder of
+a hospital in the thirteenth century; and the great-great-grandfather
+who sat as president of the Norman nobles in the States-General of 1614,
+and the grandfather who deserted arms for the toga. History is hardly
+concerned in this solemn marshalling of shades.
+
+Even with Michel-Etienne, the father of Turgot, we have here no dealing.
+Let it suffice to say that he held high municipal office in Paris, and
+performed its duties with exceptional honour and spirit, giving
+sumptuous fetes, constructing useful public works, and on one occasion
+jeoparding his life with a fine intrepidity that did not fail in his
+son, in appeasing a bloody struggle between two bodies of Swiss and
+French guards. There is in the library of the British Museum a folio of
+1740, containing elaborate plates and letterpress, descriptive of the
+fetes celebrated by the city of Paris with Michel-Etienne Turgot as its
+chief officer, on the occasion of the marriage of Louise-Elizabeth of
+France to Don Philip of Spain (August 1739). As one contemplates these
+courtly sumptuosities, La Bruyere's famous picture recurs to the mind,
+of far other scenes in the same gay land. 'We see certain wild animals,
+male and female, scattered over the fields, black, livid, all burnt by
+the sun, bound to the earth that they dig and work with unconquerable
+pertinacity; they have a sort of articulate voice, and when they rise on
+their feet, they show a human face; in fact they are men.' That these
+violent and humiliating contrasts are eternal and inevitable, is the
+last word of the dominant philosophy of society; and one of the reasons
+why Turgot's life is worth studying, is that he felt in so pre-eminent
+a degree the urgency of lightening the destiny of that livid, wild,
+hardly articulate, ever-toiling multitude.
+
+The sum of the genealogical page is that Turgot inherited that position
+which, falling to worthy souls, is of its nature so invaluable, a family
+tradition of exalted courage and generous public spirit. There have been
+noble and patriotic men who lacked this inheritance, but we may be sure
+that even these would have fought the battle at greater advantage, if a
+magnanimous preference for the larger interests had come to them as a
+matter of instinctive prejudice, instead of being acquired as a matter
+of reason. The question of titular aristocracy is not touched by this
+consideration, for titular aristocracies postpone the larger interests
+to the narrow interests of their order. And Turgot's family was only of
+the secondary noblesse of the robe.
+
+Turgot was the third son of his father. As the employments which persons
+of respectable family could enter were definite and stereotyped, there
+was little room for debate as to the calling for which a youth should
+prepare himself. Arms, civil administration, and the church, furnished
+the only three openings for a gentleman. The effects of this rigorous
+adherence to artificial and exclusive rules of caste were manifestly
+injurious to society, as such caste rules always are after a society has
+passed beyond a certain stage. To identify the interests of the richest
+and most powerful class with the interests of the church, of the army,
+and of a given system of civil government, was indeed to give to that
+class the strongest motives for leaving the existing social order
+undisturbed. It unfortunately went too far in this direction, by
+fostering the strongest possible motives of hostility to such
+modifications in these gigantic departments as changing circumstances
+might make needful, in the breasts of the only men who could produce
+these modifications without a violent organic revolution. Such a system
+left too little course to spontaneity, and its curse is the curse of
+French genius. Some of its evil effects were obvious and on the surface.
+The man who should have been a soldier found himself saying mass and
+hearing confessions. Vauvenargues, who was born for diplomacy or
+literature, passed the flower of his days in the organised dreariness of
+garrisons and marches. In our own day communities and men who lead them
+have still to learn that no waste is so profuse and immeasurable, even
+from the material point of view, as that of intellectual energy,
+checked, uncultivated, ignored, or left without its opportunity. In
+France, until a very short time before the Revolution, we can hardly
+point to a single recognised usage which did not augment this waste. The
+eldest son usually preserved the rank and status of the family, whether
+civil or military. Turgot's eldest brother was to devote himself to
+civil administration, the next to be a soldier, and Turgot himself to be
+an ecclesiastic.
+
+The second of the brothers, who began by following arms, had as little
+taste for them as the future minister had for the church. It is rather
+remarkable that he seems to have had the same passion for
+administration, and he persuaded the government after the loss of Canada
+that Guiana, to be called Equinoctial France, would if well governed
+become some sort of equivalent for the northern possession. He was made
+Governor-general, but he had forgotten to take the climate into account,
+and the scheme came to an abortive end, involving him in a mass of
+confused quarrels which lasted some years. He had a marked love for
+botany, agriculture, and the like; was one of the founders of the
+Society of Agriculture in 1760; and was the author of various pieces on
+points of natural history.[2]
+
+[Footnote 2: Among others, of a little volume still to be met with in
+libraries, _Sur la maniere de preparer les diverses curiosites
+d'histoire naturelle_ (1758).]
+
+Turgot went as a boarder first to the college of Louis-le-Grand, then to
+that of Plessis; thence to the seminary of Saint Sulpice, where he took
+the degree of bachelor in theology; and from Saint Sulpice to the
+Sorbonne. His childhood and youth, like that of other men who have
+afterwards won love and admiration, have their stories. The affection of
+one biographer records how the pocket-money with which the young Turgot
+was furnished, used always instantly to disappear, no one knew how nor
+on what. It was discovered that he gave it to poor schoolfellows to
+enable them to buy books. Condorcet justly remarks on this trait, that
+'goodness and even generosity are not rare sentiments in childhood; but
+for these sentiments to be guided by such wisdom, this really seems the
+presage of an extraordinary man, all whose sentiments should be virtues,
+because they would always be controlled by reason.'[3] It is at any rate
+certain that the union of profound benevolence with judgment, which this
+story prefigures, was the supreme distinction of Turgot's character. It
+is less pleasant to learn that Turgot throughout his childhood was
+always repulsed by his mother, who deemed him sullen, because he failed
+to make his bow with good grace, and was shy and taciturn. He fled from
+her visitors, and would hide himself behind sofa or screen; until
+dragged forth for social inspection.[4] This is only worth recording,
+because the same external awkwardness and lack of grace remained with
+Turgot to the end, and had something to do with the unpopularity that
+caused his fall. Perhaps he was thinking of his own childhood, when he
+wrote that fathers are often indifferent, or incessantly occupied with
+the details of business, and that he had seen the very parents who
+taught their children that there is nothing so noble as to make people
+happy, yet repulse the same children when urging some one's claim to
+charity or favour, and intimidate their young sensibility, instead of
+encouraging and training it.[5]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Vie de Turgot_, p. 8 (ed. 1847).]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Memoires de Morellet_, i. 12 (ed. 1822).]
+
+[Footnote 5: Lettre a Madame de Graffigny. _OEuv._ ii. 793.]
+
+Morellet, one of the best known of the little group of friends and
+brother students at the Sorbonne, has recorded other authentic traits.
+Turgot, he says, united the simplicity of a child to a peculiar dignity
+that forced the respect of his comrades. His modesty and reserve were
+those of a girl, and those equivocal references in which the
+undisciplined animalism of youth often has a stealthy satisfaction,
+always called the blood to his cheeks and covered him with
+embarrassment. For all that, his spirit was full of a frank gaiety, and
+he would indulge in long bursts of laughter at a pleasantry or frolic
+that struck him. We may be glad to know this, because without express
+testimony to the contrary, there would have been some reason for
+suspecting that Turgot was defective in that most wholesome and human
+quality of a capacity for laughter.
+
+The sensitive purity which Morellet notices, not without slight lifting
+of the eyebrow, remained with Turgot throughout his life. This was the
+more remarkable from the prevailing laxity of opinion upon this
+particular subject, perhaps the worst blemish upon the feeling and
+intelligence of the revolutionary schools. For it was not merely
+libertines, like Marmontel, making a plea for their own dissoluteness,
+who habitually spoke of these things with inconsiderate levity. Grave
+men of blameless life, like Condorcet, deliberately argued in favour of
+leaving a loose rein to the mutual inclinations of men and women, and
+laughed at the time 'wasted in quenching the darts of the flesh.'[6] It
+is true that at D'Holbach's house, the headquarters of the dogmatic
+atheism in which the irreligious reaction culminated, this was the only
+theme on which freedom of speech was sometimes curtailed. But the fact
+that such a restriction should have been noticed, suggests that it was
+exceptional.[7] One good effect followed, let us admit. The virtuousness
+of continence was not treated as a superstition by those who vindicated
+it as Turgot did, but discussed like any other virtue; and was defended
+not as an intuition of faith, but as a reasoned conclusion of the
+judgment. It was permitted to occupy no solitary and mysterious throne,
+apart and away from other conditions and parts of human excellence and
+social wellbeing. There is intrinsically no harm in any virtue being
+accepted in the firm shape of a simple prejudice. On the contrary, there
+is a multitude of practical advantages in such a consolidated and
+spontaneously working order. But in considering conduct and character,
+and forming an opinion upon infractions of a virtue, we cannot be just
+unless we have analysed its conditions, and this is what the eighteenth
+century did defectively with regard to that particular virtue which so
+often usurps the name of all of the virtues together. In this respect
+Turgot's original purity of character withdrew him from the error of the
+time.
+
+[Footnote 6: Letter to Turgot, _OEuv. de Condorcet_, i. 228. See also
+vi. 264, and 523-526.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Morellet, i. 133.]
+
+With the moral quality that we have seen, Morellet adds that for the
+intellectual side Turgot as a boy had a prodigious memory. He could
+retain as many as a hundred and eighty lines of verse, after hearing
+them twice, or sometimes even once. He knew by heart most of Voltaire's
+fugitive pieces, and long passages in his poems and tragedies. His
+predominant characteristics are described as penetration, and that other
+valuable faculty to which penetration is an indispensable adjunct, but
+which it by no means invariably implies--a spirit of broad and
+systematic co-ordination. The unusual precocity of his intelligence was
+perhaps imperfectly appreciated by his fellow-students, it led him so
+far beyond any point within their sight. It has been justly said of him
+that he passed at once from infancy to manhood, and was in the rank of
+sages before he had shaken off the dust of the playground. He was of the
+type of those who strangle serpents while yet in the cradle. We know the
+temperament which from the earliest hour consumes with eager desire for
+knowledge, and energises spontaneously with unceasing and joyful
+activity in that bright and pure morning of intellectual curiosity,
+which neither the dull tumultuous needs of life nor the mists of
+spiritual misgiving have yet come up to make dim. Of this temperament
+was Turgot in a superlative degree, and its fire never abated in him
+from college days, down to the last hours while he lay racked with
+irremediable anguish.
+
+To a certain extent this was the glorious mark of all the best minds of
+the epoch; from Voltaire downwards, they were inflamed by an
+inextinguishable and universal curiosity. Voltaire hardly left a single
+corner of the field entirely unexplored in science, poetry, history,
+philosophy. Rousseau wrote a comic opera and was an ardent botanist.
+Diderot wrote, and wrote well and intelligently, _de omni scibili_, and
+was the author alike of the Letters on the Blind and Jacques le
+Fataliste. No era was ever so little the era of the specialist.
+
+       *     *     *     *     *
+
+The society of the Sorbonne corresponded exactly to a college at one of
+our universities, and will be distinguished by the careful reader from
+the faculty of theology in the university, which was usually, but not
+always, composed of _docteurs de Sorbonne_. It consisted of a large
+number of learned men in the position of fellows, and a smaller number
+of younger students, who lived together just as undergraduates do, in
+separate apartments, but with common hall, library, and garden. One of
+Turgot's masters, Sigorgne, was the first to teach in the university the
+Newtonian principles of astronomy, instead of the Cartesian hypothesis
+of vortices. As is well known, Cartesianism had for various reasons
+taken a far deeper root in France than it ever did here, and held its
+place a good generation after Newtonian ideas were accepted and taught
+at Oxford and Cambridge.[8] Voltaire's translation of the _Principia_,
+which he was prevented by the Cartesian chancellor, D'Aguesseau, from
+publishing until 1738, overthrew the reigning system, and gave a strong
+impulse to scientific inquiry.
+
+[Footnote 8: Whewell's _Hist. Induct. Sciences_, ii. 147-159.]
+
+Turgot mastered the new doctrine with avidity. In the acute letter of
+criticism which, while still at the Sorbonne, he addressed to Buffon, he
+pointedly urged it as the first objection to that writer's theory of the
+formation and movements of the planets, that any attempt at fundamental
+explanations of this kind was a departure from 'the simplicity and safe
+reserve of the philosophy of Newton.'[9] He only, however, made a
+certain advance in mathematics. He appears to have had no peculiar or
+natural aptitude for this study; though he is said to have constantly
+blamed himself for not having gone more deeply into it. It is hardly to
+be denied that mathematical genius and philosophic genius do not always
+go together. The precision, definiteness, and accurate limitations of
+the method of the one, are usually unfriendly to the brooding,
+tentative, uncircumscribed meditation which is the productive humour in
+the other. Turgot was essentially of the philosophising temper. Though
+the activity of his intelligence was incessant, his manner of work was
+the reverse of quick. 'When he applied to work,' says Morellet, 'when it
+was a question of writing or doing, he was slow and loitering. Slow,
+because he insisted on finishing all he did perfectly, according to his
+own conception of perfection, which was most difficult of attainment,
+even down to the minutest detail; and because he would not receive
+assistance, being never contented with what he had not done himself. He
+also loitered a great deal, losing time in arranging his desk and
+cutting his pens, not that he was not thinking profoundly through all
+this trifling; but mere thinking did not advance his work.'[10] We may
+admit, perhaps, that the work was all the better for the thinking that
+preceded it, and that the time which Turgot seemed to waste in cutting
+his pens and setting his table in order was more fruitfully spent than
+the busiest hours of most men.
+
+[Footnote 9: _OEuv. de Turgot_, ii. 783. (Edition of Messrs. Eugene
+Daire and H. Dussard, published in the _Collection des Principaux
+Economistes_, published by Guillaumin, 1844.)]
+
+[Footnote 10: _Memoires_, i. 16.]
+
+We know the books which Turgot and his friends devoured with ardour.
+Locke, Bayle, Voltaire, Buffon, relieved Clarke, Leibnitz, Spinosa,
+Cudworth; and constant discussions among themselves both cleared up and
+enlarged what they read.[11] One of the disputants, certainly not the
+least amiable, has painted his own part in these discussions: 'I was
+violent in discussion,' says the good Morellet, as he was pleasantly
+called, 'but without my antagonist being able to reproach me with a
+single insult; and sometimes I used to spit blood, after a debate in
+which I had not allowed a single personality to escape me.'[12]
+
+[Footnote 11: _Ib._ i. 20.]
+
+[Footnote 12: _Ib._ i. 19.]
+
+Another member of the circle was Lomenie de Brienne, who, in long years
+after, was chief minister of France for a narrow space through the
+momentous winter of 1787 and the spring of the next year, filling the
+gap between Calonne and Necker in a desperate and fatal manner.
+Lomenie's ambition dated from his youth; and it was always personal and
+mean. While Turgot, his friend, was earnestly meditating on the
+destinies of the race and the conditions of their development, Lomenie
+was dreaming only of the restoration of his ancestral chateau of
+Brienne. Though quite without means, he planned this in his visions on a
+scale of extreme costliness and magnificence. The dreams fell true.
+Money came to the family, and the chateau was built exactly as he had
+projected it, at a cost of two million francs.[13] His career was
+splendid. He was clever, industrious, and persevering after his fashion,
+astute, lively, pretentious, a person ever by well-planned hints leading
+you to suppose his unrevealed profundity to be bottomless; in a word, in
+all respects an impostor.[14] He espoused that richly dowered bride the
+Church, rose to be Archbishop of Toulouse, and would have risen to be
+Archbishop of Paris, but for the King's over-scrupulous conviction that
+'an Archbishop of Paris must at least believe in God.' He became an
+immense favourite with Marie Antoinette and the court, was made Minister
+'like Richelieu and Mazarin,' and after having postured and played
+tricks in face of the bursting deluge, and given the government the
+final impulse into the abyss of bankruptcy, was dismissed with the rich
+archbishopric of Sens and a cardinal's hat for himself, and good
+sinecures for his kinsfolk. His last official act was to send for the
+20,000 livres for his month's salary, not fully due. His brother, the
+Count of Brienne, remained in office as Minister of War. He was a person
+of no talent, his friends allowed, but 'assisted by a good chief clerk,
+he would have made a good minister; he meant well.' This was hardly a
+sufficient reason for letting him take 100,000 francs out of an
+impoverished treasury for the furniture of his residence. The hour,
+however, was just striking, and the knife was sharpened.
+
+[Footnote 13: Morellet's _Memoires_, i. 17-21; 262-270; and ii. 15.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Marmontel's _Memoires_, bk. xiii.; Morellet, however, with
+persevering friendliness, denies the truth of Marmontel's picture (ii.
+465).]
+
+All his paltry honour and glory Lomenie de Brienne enjoyed for a season,
+until the Jacobins laid violent hands upon him. He poisoned himself in
+his own palace, just as a worse thing was about to befall him. Alas,
+poetic justice is the exception in history, and only once in many
+generations does the drama of the state criminal rise to an artistic
+fifth act. This was in 1794. In 1750 a farewell dinner had been given in
+the rooms of the Abbe de Brienne at the Sorbonne, and the friends made
+an appointment for a game of tennis behind the church of the Sorbonne in
+the year 1800.[15] The year came, but no Lomenie, nor Turgot, and the
+Sorbonne itself had vanished.
+
+[Footnote 15: Morellet, i. 21.]
+
+When the time arrived for his final acceptance of an ecclesiastical
+destination, Turgot felt that honourable repugnance, which might have
+been anticipated alike from his morality and his intelligence, to enter
+into an engagement which would irrevocably bind him for the rest of his
+life, either always to hold exactly the same opinions, or else to
+continue to preach them publicly after he had ceased to hold them
+privately. No certainty of worldly comfort and advantage could in his
+eyes counterbalance the possible danger and shame of a position, which
+might place him between the two alternatives of stifling his
+intelligence and outraging his conscience--the one by blind,
+unscrutinising, and immovable acceptance of all the dogmas and
+sentiments of the Church; the other by the inculcation as truths of what
+he believed to be false, and the proscription as falsehoods of what he
+believed to be true. The horror and disgrace of such a situation were
+too striking for one who used his mind and acted on principle, to run
+any risk of that situation becoming his own. An ambitious timeserver
+like Lomenie, or a contented adherent of use and wont like Morellet,
+might well regard such considerations as the products of a weak and
+eccentric scrupulosity. Turgot was of other calibre, holding it to be
+only a degree less unprincipled than the avowed selfishness of the
+adventurer, to contract so serious an engagement on the strength of
+common hearsay and current usage, without deliberate personal reflection
+and inquiry.
+
+At the close of his course at the Sorbonne, he wrote a letter to his
+father giving the reasons for this resolution to abandon all idea of an
+ecclesiastical career and the advancement which it offered him, and
+seeking his consent for the change from Church to law. His father
+approved of the resolution, and gave the required consent. As Turgot had
+studied law as well as theology, no time was lost, and he formally
+entered the profession of the law as Deputy-Counsellor of the
+Procureur-General at the beginning of 1752.
+
+His college friends had remonstrated warmly at this surrender of a
+brilliant prospect. A little deputation of young abbes, fresh from their
+vows, waited on him at his rooms; in that humour of blithe and sagacious
+good-will which comes so naturally to men who believe they have just
+found out Fortune's trick and yoked her fast for ever to the car, they
+declared that he was about to do something opposed to his own interest
+and inconsistent with his usual good sense. He was a younger son of a
+Norman house, and therefore poor; the law without a competency involved
+no consideration, and he could hope for no advancement in it: whereas in
+the Church his family, being possessed of influence and credit, would
+have no difficulty in procuring for him excellent abbeys and in good
+time a rich bishopric; here he could realise all his fine dreams of
+administration, and without ceasing to be a churchman could play the
+statesman to his heart's content. In one profession he would waste his
+genius in arguing trifling private affairs, while in the other he would
+be of the highest usefulness to his country, and would acquire the
+greatest reputation. Turgot, however, insisted on placing genius and
+reputation below the necessity of being honest. The object of an oath
+might be of the least important kind, but he could neither allow himself
+to play with it, nor believe that a man could abase his profession in
+public opinion, without at the same time abasing himself. '_You shall do
+as you will_,' he said; '_for my own part, it is impossible for me to
+wear a mask all my life_.'[16]
+
+[Footnote 16: Dupont de Nemours. Condorcet's _Vie de Turgot_, pp. 8-10.]
+
+His clear intelligence revolted from the dominant sophisms of that time,
+by which philosophers as well as ecclesiastics brought falsehood and
+hypocrisy within the four corners of a decent doctrine of truth and
+morality. The churchman manfully argued that he could be most useful to
+the world if he were well off and highly placed. The philosopher
+contended that as the world would punish him if he avowed what he had
+written or what he believed, he was fully warranted in lying to the
+world as to his writing and belief; for is not the right to have the
+truth told to you, a thing forfeitable by tyranny and oppression?[17]
+Truth is not mocked, and these sophisms bore their fruit in due season.
+Perhaps if there had been found on either side in France a hundred
+righteous men like Turgot, who would not fight in masks, the end might
+have been other than it was. The lesson remains for those who dream that
+by reducing pretence to a nicely graduated system, and by leaving an
+exactly measured margin between what they really believe and what they
+feign to believe, they are serving the great cause of order. French
+history informs us what becomes of social order so served. After all, no
+man can be sure that it is required of him to save society; every man
+can be sure that he is called upon to keep himself clean from mendacity
+and equivoke. Such was Turgot's view.
+
+[Footnote 17: 'La necessite de mentir pour desavouer un ouvrage est une
+extremite qui repugne egalement a la conscience et a la noblesse du
+caractere; mais le crime est pour les hommes injustes qui rendent ce
+desaveu necessaire a la surete de celui qu'ils y forcent. Si vous avez
+erige en crime ce qui n'en est pas un, si vous avez porte atteinte, par
+des lois absurdes ou par des lois arbitraires, au droit naturel qu'ont
+tous les hommes, non seulement d'avoir une opinion, mais de la rendre
+publique, alors vous meritez de perdre celui qu'a chaque homme
+d'entendre la verite de la bouche d'un autre, droit qui fonde seule
+l'obligation rigoureuse de ne pas mentir.'--Condorcet, _Vie de Voltaire_
+(_OEuv._ iv. 33, 34).]
+
+We have said that Turgot disdained to fight under a mask. There was one
+exception, and only one. In 1754 there appeared two letters, nominally
+from an ecclesiastic to a magistrate, and entitled _Le Conciliateur_.
+Here it is enough to say that they were intended to enforce the
+propriety and duty of religious toleration. In a letter to a friend we
+find Turgot saying, 'Although the _Conciliator_ is of my principles, and
+those of our friend, I am astonished at your conjectures; _it is neither
+his style nor mine_.'[18] Yet Turgot had written it. This is his one
+public literary equivocation. Let us, at all events, allow that it was
+resorted to, not to break the law with safety, nor to cloak a malicious
+attack on a person, but to give additional weight by means of a harmless
+prosopopoeia, to an argument for the noblest of principles.[19]
+
+[Footnote 18: _OEuv._ ii. 685. Morellet says that it was written by
+Lomenie de Brienne, 19.]
+
+[Footnote 19: See the note of Dupont de Nemours, _ad loc._]
+
+       *     *     *     *     *
+
+Before Turgot entered the great world, he had already achieved an amount
+of success in philosophic speculation, which placed him in the front
+rank of social thinkers. To that passion for study and the acquisition
+of knowledge which is not uncommon in youth, as it is one of the most
+attractive of youth's qualities, there was added in him what is
+unhappily not common in men and women of any age--an active impulse to
+use his own intelligence upon the information which he gained from books
+and professors. He was no conceited or froward caviller at authority,
+nor born rebel against established teachers and governors. His
+understanding seriously craved a full and independent satisfaction, and
+could draw this only from laborious meditation, which should either
+disclose the inadequacy of the grounds for an opinion, or else establish
+it, with what would be to him a new and higher because an independently
+acquired, conclusiveness.
+
+His letter to Buffon, to which we have already referred, is an
+illustration of this wise, and never captious nor ungracious, caution in
+receiving ideas. Neither Buffon's reputation, nor the glow of his style,
+nor the dazzling ingenuity and grandeur of his conceptions--all of them
+so well calculated, at one-and-twenty, to throw even a vigilant
+intelligence off its guard--could divert Turgot from the prime
+scientific duty of confronting a theory with facts. Buffon was for
+explaining the formation of the earth and the other planets, and their
+lateral movement, by the hypothesis that a comet had fallen obliquely on
+to the sun, driven off certain portions of its constituent matter in a
+state of fusion, and that these masses, made spherical by the mutual
+attraction of their parts, were carried to different distances in
+proportion to their mass and the force originally impressed on them.
+Buffon may have been actuated, both here and in his other famous
+hypothesis of reproduction, by a desire, less to propound a true and
+durable explanation, than to arrest by a bold and comprehensive
+generalisation that attention, which is only imperfectly touched by mere
+collections of particular facts. The enormous impulse which even the
+most unscientific of the speculations of Descartes had given to European
+thought, was a standing temptation to philosophers, not to discard nor
+relax patient observation, but to bind together the results which they
+arrived at by this process, by means of some hardy hypothesis. It might
+be true or not, but it was at any rate sure to strike the imagination,
+which ever craves wholes; and to stimulate discussion and further
+discovery, by sending assailants and defenders alike in search of new
+facts, to confirm or overthrow the position.[20]
+
+[Footnote 20: See Condorcet's eloge on Buffon (_OEuv._ iii. 335); and
+a passage from Bourdon, quoted in Whewell's _Hist. Induct. Sci._ iii.
+348.]
+
+Turgot was less sensible of these possible advantages, than he was alive
+to the certain dangers of such a method. He perceived that to hold a
+theory otherwise than as an inference from facts, is to have a strong
+motive for looking at the facts in a predetermined light, or for
+ignoring them; an involuntary predisposition most fatal to the discovery
+of truth, which is nothing more than the conformity of our conception of
+facts to their adequately observed order. Why, he asks, do you replunge
+us into the night of hypotheses, justifying the Cartesians and their
+three elements and their vortices? And whence comes your comet? Was it
+within the sphere of the sun's attraction? If not, how could it fall
+from the sphere of the other bodies, and fall on the sun, which was not
+acting on it? If it was, it must have fallen perpendicularly, not
+obliquely; and, therefore, if it imparted a lateral movement, this
+direction must have been impressed on it. And, if so, why should not God
+have impressed this movement upon the planets directly, as easily as
+upon the comet to communicate it to them? Finally, how could the planets
+have left the body of the sun without falling back into it again? What
+curve did they describe in leaving it, so as never to return? Can you
+suppose that gravitation could cause the same body to describe a spiral
+and an ellipse? In the same exact spirit, Turgot brings known facts to
+bear on Buffon's theory of the arrangement of the terrestrial and marine
+divisions of the earth's surface. The whole criticism he sent to Buffon
+anonymously, to assure him that the writer had no other motive than the
+interest he took in the discovery of truth and the perfection of a great
+work.[21]
+
+[Footnote 21: October, 1748. _OEuv._ ii. 782-784.]
+
+Turgot's is probably the only case where the biographer has, in emerging
+from the days of school and college, at once to proceed to expound and
+criticise the intellectual productions of his hero, and straightway to
+present fruit and flower of a time that usually does no more than
+prepare the unseen roots. There is, perhaps, a wider and more
+stimulating attraction of a dramatic kind in the study of characters
+which present a history of active and continuous growth; which, while
+absolutely free from flimsy caprice and disordered eccentricity, are
+ever surprising our attention by an unsuspected word of calm judgment or
+fertile energy, a fresh interest or an added sympathy, by the
+disappearance of some crudity or the assimilation of some new and richer
+quality. Of such gradual rise into full maturity we have here nothing to
+record. As a student Turgot had already formed the list of a number of
+works which he designed to execute; poems, tragedies, philosophic
+romances, vast treatises on physics, history, geography, politics,
+morals, metaphysics, and language.[22] Of some he had drawn out the
+plan, and even these plans and fragments possess a novelty and depth of
+view that belong even to the integrity of few works.
+
+[Footnote 22: Condorcet's _Vie de Turgot_, 14.]
+
+Before passing on to the more scientific speculations of this remarkable
+intelligence, it is worth while to notice his letter to Madame de
+Graffigny, both for the intrinsic merit and scope of the ideas it
+contains and for the proof it furnishes of the interest, at once early
+and profound, which he took in moral questions lying at the very bottom,
+as well of sound character, as of a healthy society. Turgot's early
+passion for literature had made him seize an occasion of being
+introduced to even so moderately renowned a professor of it as Madame de
+Graffigny. He happened to be intimate with her niece, who afterwards
+became the lively and witty wife of Helvetius, somewhat to the surprise
+of Turgot's friends. For although he persuaded Mademoiselle de
+Ligniville to present him to her aunt, and though he assiduously
+attended Madame de Graffigny's literary gatherings, Turgot would
+constantly quit the circle of men of letters for the sake of a game of
+battledore with the comely and attractive niece. Hence the astonishment
+of men that from such familiarity there grew no stronger passion, and
+that whatever the causes of such reserve, the only issue was a tender
+and lasting friendship.[23]
+
+[Footnote 23: Morellet, i. 140.]
+
+Madame de Graffigny had begged Turgot's opinion upon the manuscript of a
+work composed, as so many others were, after the pattern of
+Montesquieu's _Lettres Persanes_,--now nearly thirty years old,--and
+bearing the accurately imitative title of _Lettres Peruviennes_. A
+Peruvian comes to Europe, and sends to a friend or mistress in Peru a
+series of remarks on civilisation. Goldsmith's delightful _Citizen of
+the World_ is the best known type in our own literature of this
+primitive form of social criticism. The effect upon common opinion of
+criticism cast in such a mould, presenting familiar habits,
+institutions, and observances, in a striking and unusual light, was to
+give a kind of Socratic stimulus to people's ideas about education,
+civilisation, conduct, and the other topics springing from a comparison
+between the manners of one community and another. That one of the two,
+whether Peru, or China, or Persia, was a community drawn mainly from the
+imagination, did not render the contrast any the less effective in
+stirring men's minds.
+
+By the middle of the century the air was full of ideas upon these social
+subjects. The temptation was irresistible to turn from the confusion of
+squalor, oppression, license, distorted organisation, penetrative
+disorder, to ideal states comprising a little range of simple
+circumstances, and a small number of types of virtuous and
+unsophisticated character. Much came of the relief thus sought and
+found. It was the beginning of the subversive process, for it taught men
+to look away from ideas of practical amelioration. The genius of
+Rousseau gave these dreams the shape which, in many respects, so
+unfortunately for France, finally attracted the bulk of the national
+sentiment and sympathy. But the vivid, humane, and inspiring pages of
+_Emile_ were not published until ten years after Turgot's letter to
+Madame de Graffigny:[24] a circumstance which may teach us that in moral
+as in physical discoveries, though one man may take the final step and
+reap the fame, the conditions have been prepared beforehand. It is
+almost discouraging to think that we may reproduce such passages as the
+following, without being open to the charge of slaying the slain, though
+one hundred and twenty years have elapsed since it was written.
+
+[Footnote 24: Written in 1751. _OEuv._ ii. 785-794.]
+
+'Let Zilia show that our too arbitrary institutions have too often made
+us forget nature; that we have been the dupes of our own handiwork, and
+that the savage who does not know how to consult nature knows how to
+follow her. Let her criticise our pedantry, for it is this that
+constitutes our education of the present day. Look at the Rudiments;
+they begin by insisting on stuffing into the heads of children a crowd
+of the most abstract ideas. Those whom nature in her variety summons to
+her by all her objects, we fasten up in a single spot, we occupy them on
+words which cannot convey any sense to them, because the sense of words
+can only come with ideas, and ideas only come by degrees, starting from
+sensible objects.[25] But, besides, we insist on their acquiring them
+without the help that we have had, we whom age and experience have
+formed. We keep their imagination prisoner, we deprive them of the
+sight of objects by which nature gives to the savage his first notions
+of all things, of all the sciences even. We have not the coup-d'oeil
+of nature.
+
+[Footnote 25: 'On sera surpris que je compte l'etude des langues au
+nombre des inutilites de l'education,' etc.--_Emile_, bk. ii.]
+
+'It is the same with morality; general ideas again spoil all. People
+take great trouble to tell a child that he must be just, temperate, and
+virtuous; and has it the least idea of virtue? Do not say to your son,
+_Be virtuous_, but make him find pleasure in being so; develop within
+his heart the germ of sentiments that nature has placed there.[26] There
+is often much more need for bulwarks against education, than against
+nature. Give him opportunities of being truthful, liberal,
+compassionate; rely on the human heart; leave these precious seeds to
+bloom in the air which surrounds them; do not stifle them under a
+quantity of frames and network. I am not one of those who want to reject
+general and abstract ideas; they are necessary; but I by no means think
+them in their place in our method of instruction. I would have them come
+to children as they come to men, by degrees.
+
+[Footnote 26: See Locke, _Of Education_, Sec.Sec. 81, 184, etc.]
+
+'Another article of our education, which strikes me as bad and
+ridiculous, is our severity towards these poor children. They do
+something silly; we take them up as if it were extremely important.
+There is a multitude of these follies, of which they will cure
+themselves by age alone. But people do not count on that; they insist
+that the son should be well bred, and they overwhelm him with little
+rules of civility, often frivolous, which can only harass him, as he
+does not know the reason for them. I think it would be enough to hinder
+him from being troublesome to the persons that he sees.[27] The rest
+will come, little by little. Inspire him with the desire of pleasing; he
+will soon know more of the art than all the masters could teach him.
+People wish again that a child should be grave; they think it wise for
+it not to run, and fear every moment that it will fall. What happens?
+You weary and enfeeble it. We have especially forgotten that it is a
+part of education to form the body.'[28]
+
+[Footnote 27: 'La seule lecon de morale qui convienne a l'enfance, et la
+plus importante a tout age, est de ne jamais faire de mal a personne,'
+etc. _Emile_, bk. ii. 'Never trouble yourself about these faults in
+them, which you know age will cure. And therefore want of well-fashioned
+civility in the carriage ... should be the parents' least care while
+they are young. If his tender mind be filled with a veneration for his
+parents and teachers, which consists in love and esteem and a fear to
+offend them; and with respect and good-will to all people; that respect
+will of itself teach these ways of expressing it, which he observes most
+acceptable,' etc.--Locke, _Of Education_, Sec.Sec. 63, 67, etc.]
+
+[Footnote 28: 'Vous donnez la science, a la bonne heure; moi je m'occupe
+de l'instrument propre a l'acquerir,' etc.--_Emile._]
+
+The reader who remembers Locke's Thoughts concerning Education
+(published in 1690), and the particularly homely prescriptions upon the
+subjects of the infant body with which that treatise opens, will
+recognise the source of Turgot's inspiration. The same may be said of
+the other wise passages in this letter, upon the right attitude of a
+father towards his child. It was not merely the metaphysics of the sage
+and positive Locke which laid the revolutionary train in France. This
+influence extended over the whole field, and even Rousseau confesses the
+obligations of the imaginary governor of Emile to the real Locke.
+
+We are again plainly in the Lockian atmosphere, when Turgot speaks of
+men being the dupes of 'general ideas, which are true because drawn from
+nature, but which people embrace with a narrow stiffness that makes them
+false, because they no longer combine them with circumstances, taking
+for absolute what is only the expression of a relation.' The merit of
+this and the other educational parts of the piece, is not their
+originality, but that kind of complete and finished assimilation which
+is all but tantamount to independent thought, and which in certain
+conditions may be much more practically useful.
+
+Not less important to the happiness of men than the manner of their
+education, is their own cultivation of a wise spirit of tolerance in
+conduct. 'I should like to see explained,' Turgot says, 'the causes of
+alienation and disgust between people who love one another. I believe
+that after living awhile with men, we perceive that bickerings,
+ill-humours, teasings on trifles, perhaps cause more troubles and
+divisions among them than serious things. How many bitternesses have
+their origin in a word, in forgetfulness of some slight observances. If
+people would only weigh in an exact balance so many little wrongs, if
+they would only put themselves in the place of those who have to
+complain of them, if they would only reflect how many times they have
+themselves given way to humours, how many things they have forgotten! A
+single word spoken in disparagement of our intelligence is enough to
+make us irreconcilable, and yet how often have we been deceived in the
+very same matter. How many persons of understanding have we taken for
+fools? Why should not others have the same privilege as ourselves?...
+Ah, what address is needed to live together, to be compliant without
+cringing, to expose a fault without harshness, to correct without
+imperious air, to remonstrate without ill-temper!' All this is wise and
+good, but, alas, as Turgot had occasion by and by to say, little comes
+of giving rules instead of breeding habits.
+
+It is curious that Turgot as early in his career as this should have
+protested against one of the most dangerous doctrines of the
+_philosophe_ school. 'I have long thought,' he says, 'that our nation
+needs to have marriage and true marriage preached to it. We contract
+marriages ignobly, from views of ambition or interest; and as many of
+them are unhappy in consequence, we may see growing up from day to day a
+fashion of thinking that is extremely mischievous to the community, to
+manners, to the stability of families, and to domestic happiness and
+virtue.'[29] Looseness of opinion as to the family and the conditions of
+its wellbeing and stability, was a flaw that ran through the whole
+period of revolutionary thought. It was not surprising that the family
+should come in for its share of destructive criticism, along with the
+other elements of the established system, but it is a proof of the
+solidity of Turgot's understanding that he should from the first have
+detected the mischievousness of this side of the great social attack.
+Nor did subsequent discussion with the champions of domestic license
+have any effect upon his opinion.
+
+[Footnote 29: ii. 790.]
+
+He makes the protest which the moralist makes, and has to make in every
+age, against the practice of determining the expediency of a marriage by
+considerations of money or rank. There is a great abuse, he says, in the
+manner in which marriages are made without the two persons most
+concerned having any knowledge of one another, and solely under the
+authority of the parents, who are guided either by fortune, or else by
+station, that will one day translate itself into fortune. 'I know,' he
+says, 'that even marriages of inclination do not always succeed. So from
+the fact that sometimes people make mistakes in their choice, it is
+concluded that we ought never to choose.' Condorcet, we may remember,
+many years after, insisted on the banishment by public opinion of
+avaricious and mercenary considerations from marriage, as one of the
+most important means of diminishing the great inequalities in the
+accumulation of wealth.[30]
+
+[Footnote 30: _OEuv. de Condorcet_, vi. 245.]
+
+In the same letter he took sides by anticipation in another cardinal
+controversy of the epoch, by declaring a preference for the savage over
+the civilised state to be a 'ridiculous declamation.' This strange and
+fatal debate had been opened by Rousseau's memorable first Discourse,
+which was given to the world in 1750. Preference for the savage state
+was the peculiar form assumed by emotional protests against the existing
+system of the distribution of wealth. Turgot from first to last resisted
+the whole spirit of such protests. In this letter, where he makes his
+first approach to the subject, he insists on inequality of conditions,
+as alike necessary and useful. It is necessary 'because men are not born
+equal; because their strength, their intelligence, their passions, would
+be perpetually overthrowing that momentous equilibrium among them, which
+the laws might have established.'
+
+'What would society be without this inequality of conditions? Each
+individual would be reduced to mere necessaries, or rather there would
+be very many to whom mere necessaries would be by no means assured. Men
+cannot labour without implements and without the means of subsistence,
+until the gathering in of the produce. Those who have not had
+intelligence enough, or any opportunity to acquire these things, have no
+right to take them away from one who has earned and deserved them by his
+labour. If the idle and ignorant were to despoil the industrious and the
+skilful, all works would be discouraged, and misery would become
+universal. It is alike more just and more useful that all those who have
+fallen behind either in wit or in good fortune, should lend their right
+arms to those who know how best to employ them, who can pay them a wage
+in advance, and guarantee them a share in the future profits.... There
+is no injustice in this, that a man who has discovered a productive kind
+of work, and who has supplied his assistants with sustenance and the
+necessary implements, who for this has only made free contracts with
+them, should keep back the larger part, and that as payment for his
+advances he should have less toil and more leisure. It is this leisure
+which gives him a better chance of revolving schemes, and still further
+increasing his lights; and what he can economise from his share of the
+produce, which is with entire equity a larger share, augments his
+capital, and adds to his power of entering into new undertakings....
+
+'What would become of society, if things were not so, and if each person
+tilled his own little plot? He would also have to build his own house,
+and make his own clothes. What would the people live upon, who dwell in
+lands that produce no wheat? Who would transport the productions of one
+country to another country? The humblest peasant enjoys a multitude of
+commodities often got together from remote climes.... This distribution
+of professions necessarily leads to inequality of conditions.'
+
+So early was the rational answer ready for those socialistic sophisms
+which for so many years misled the most generous part of French
+intelligence. We may regret perhaps that in demolishing the vision of
+perfect social equality, Turgot did not show a more lively sense of the
+need for lessening and softening unavoidable inequalities of condition.
+However capable these inequalities may be of scientific defence, they
+are none the less on that account in need of incessant and strenuous
+practical modification; and it is one of the most serious misfortunes of
+society, and is unhappily long likely to remain so, that since the
+absorbing question of the reformation of the economic conditions of the
+social union has come more and more prominently to the front, gradually
+but irresistibly thrusting behind both its religious and its political
+conditions, zeal for the amelioration of the common lot has in so few
+auspicious instances been according to knowledge; while the professors
+of science have been more careful to compose narrow apologies for
+individual selfishness, than to extend as widely as possible the limits
+set by demonstrable principle to the improvement of the common life.
+
+We may notice too in this Letter, what so many of Turgot's allies and
+friends were disposed to complain of, but what will commend him to a
+less newly emancipated and therefore a less fanatical generation. There
+is a conspicuous absence of that peculiar boundlessness of hope, that
+zealous impatience for the instant realisation and fruition of all the
+inspirations of philosophic intelligence, which carried others
+immediately around him so excessively far in the creed of
+Perfectibility. 'Liberty! I answer with a sigh, maybe that men are not
+worthy of thee! Equality! They would yearn after thee, but cannot
+attain!' Compared with the confident exultation and illimitable sense of
+the worth of man which distinguished that time, there is something like
+depression here, as in many other places in Turgot's writings. It is
+usually less articulate, and is rather conveyed by a running undertone,
+which so often reveals more of a writer's true mood and temper than is
+seen in his words, giving to them, by some unconscious and inscrutable
+process, living effects upon the reader's sense like those of eye and
+voice and accompanying gesture.
+
+Dejection, however, is perhaps not the most proper word for the humour
+of reserved and grave suspense, natural in those rare spirits who have
+recognised how narrow is the way of truth and how few there be that
+enter therein, and what prolonged concurrence of favouring hazards with
+gigantic endeavour is needed for each smallest step in the halting
+advancement of the race. With Turgot this was not the result of mere
+sentimental brooding. It had a deliberate and reasoned foundation in
+historical study. He was patient and not hastily sanguine as to the
+speedy coming of the millennial future, exactly because history had
+taught him to measure the laggard paces of the past. The secret of the
+intense hopefulness of that time lay in the mournfully erroneous
+conviction that the one condition of progress is plenteous increase of
+light. Turgot saw very early that this is not so. '_It is not error_,'
+he wrote, in a saying that every champion of a new idea should have
+ever in letters of flame before his eyes, '_which opposes the progress
+of truth: it is indolence, obstinacy, the spirit of routine, everything
+that favours inaction_.'[31]
+
+[Footnote 31: _OEuv._ ii. 672.]
+
+The others left these potent elements of obstruction out of calculation
+and account. With Turgot they were the main facts to be considered, and
+the main forces to be counteracted. It is the mark of the highest kind
+of union between sagacious, firm, and clear-sighted intelligence, and a
+warm and steadfast glow of social feeling, when a man has learnt how
+little the effort of the individual can do either to hasten or direct
+the current of human destiny, and yet finds in effort his purest
+pleasure and his most constant duty. If we owe honour to that social
+endeavour which is stimulated and sustained by an enthusiastic
+confidence in speedy and full fruition, we surely owe it still more to
+those, who knowing how remote and precarious and long beyond their own
+days is the hour of fruit, yet need no other spur nor sustenance than
+bare hope, and in this strive and endeavour and still endeavour. Here
+lies the true strength, and it was the possession of this strength and
+the constant call and strain upon it, which gave Turgot in mien and
+speech a gravity that revolted the frivolous or indifferent, and seemed
+cold and timorous to the enthusiastic and urgent. Turgot had discovered
+that there was a law in the history of men, and he knew how this law
+limited and conditioned progress.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+In 1750 Turgot, then only in his twenty-fourth year, was appointed to
+the honorary office of Prior of the Sorbonne, an elective distinction
+conferred annually, as it appears, on some meritorious or highly
+connected student. It was held in the following year by Lomenie de
+Brienne. In this capacity Turgot read two Latin dissertations, one at
+the opening of the session, and the other at its close. The first of
+these was upon 'The Advantages that the Establishment of Christianity
+has conferred upon the Human Race.'
+
+       *     *     *     *     *
+
+Its value, as might well have been expected from the circumstances of
+its production, is not very high. It is pitched in a tone of exaltation
+that is eminently unfavourable to the permanently profitable treatment
+of such a subject. There are in it too many of those eloquent and
+familiar commonplaces of orthodox history, by which the doubter tries to
+warm himself into belief, and the believer dreams that he is
+corroborating faith by reason. The assembly for whom his discourse was
+prepared, could hardly have endured the apparition in the midst of them
+of what both rigorous justice and accurate history required to have
+taken into account on the other side. It was not to be expected that a
+young student within the precincts of the Sorbonne should have any eyes
+for the evil with which the forms of the Christian religion, like other
+growths of the human mind, from the lowest forms of savage animism
+upwards, have ever alloyed its good. The absence of all reference to one
+half of what the annals of the various Christian churches have to teach
+us, robs the first of Turgot's discourses of that serious and durable
+quality which belongs to all his other writings.
+
+It is fair to point out that the same vicious exclusiveness was
+practised by the enemies of the Church, and that if history was to one
+of the two contending factions an exaggerated enumeration of the
+blessings of Christianity, it was to their passionate rivals only a
+monotonous catalogue of curses. Of this temper we have a curious
+illustration in the circumstance that Dupont, Turgot's intimate friend
+of later years, who collected and published his works, actually took the
+trouble to suppress the opening of this very Discourse, in which Turgot
+had replied to the reproach often made against Christianity, of being
+useful only for a future life.[32]
+
+[Footnote 32: _OEuv._ ii. 586, _n._]
+
+In the first Discourse, Turgot considers the influence of Christianity
+first upon human nature, and secondly on political societies. One
+feature at least deserves remark, and this is that in spite both of a
+settled partiality, and a certain amount of the common form of theology,
+yet at bottom and putting some phrases apart, religion is handled, and
+its workings traced, much as they would have been if treated as
+admittedly secular forces. And this was somewhat. Let us proceed to
+analyse what Turgot says.
+
+1. Before the preaching and acceptance of the new faith, all nations
+alike were plunged into the most extravagant superstitions. The most
+frightful dissoluteness of manners was encouraged by the example of the
+gods themselves. Every passion and nearly every vice was the object of a
+monstrous deification. A handful of philosophers existed, who had learnt
+no better lesson from their reason, than to despise the multitude of
+their fellows. In the midst of the universal contagion, the Jews alone
+remained pure. Even the Jews were affected with a narrow and sterile
+pride, which proved how little they appreciated the priceless treasure
+that was entrusted to their keeping. What were the effects of the
+appearance of Christ, and the revelation of the gospel? It inspired men
+with a tender zeal for the truth, and by establishing the necessity of a
+body of teachers for the instruction of nations, made studiousness and
+intellectual application indispensable in a great number of persons.
+
+Consider, again, the obscurity, incertitude, and incongruousness, that
+marked the ideas of the wisest of the ancients upon the nature of man
+and of God, and the origin of creation; the Ideas of Plato, for
+instance, the Numbers of Pythagoras, the theurgic extravagances of
+Plotinus and Porphyry and Iamblichus; and then measure the contributions
+made by the scholastic theologians, whose dry method has undergone so
+much severe condemnation, to the instruments by which knowledge is
+enlarged and made accurate. It was the Church, moreover, which
+civilised the Northern barbarians, and so preserved the West from the
+same barbarism and desolation with which the triumphs of Mahometanism
+replaced the knowledge and arts and prosperity of the East. It is to the
+services of the Church that we owe the perpetuation of a knowledge of
+the ancient tongues, and if this knowledge, and the possession of the
+masterpieces of thought and feeling and form, the flower of the ancient
+European mind, remained so long unproductive, still religious
+organisation deserves our gratitude equally for keeping these great
+treasures for happier times. They survived, as trees stripped by winter
+of their leaves survive through frost and storm, to give new blossoms in
+a new spring.
+
+This much on the intellectual side; but how can we describe the moral
+transformation which the new faith brought to pass? Men who had hitherto
+only regarded gods as beings to be entreated to avert ill or bestow
+blessing, now learnt the nobler emotion of devout love for a divinity of
+supreme power and beneficence. The new faith, besides kindling love for
+God, inflamed the kindred sentiment of love for men, all of whom it
+declared to be the children of God, one vast family with a common
+father. Julian himself bore witness to the fidelity with which the
+Christians, whose faith he hated or despised, tended the sick and fed
+the poor, not only of their own association, but those also who were
+without the fold. The horrible practice of exposing new-born infants,
+which outraged nature, and yet did not touch the heart nor the
+understanding of a Numa, an Aristotle, a Confucius, was first proscribed
+by the holy religion of Christ. If shame and misery still sometimes, in
+the hearts of poor outcast mothers, overpower the horror which
+Christianity first inspired, it is still the same religion which has
+opened sheltering places for the unhappy victims of such a practice, and
+provided means for rearing foundlings into useful citizens.
+
+Christian teaching, by reviving the principles of sensibility within the
+breast, may be said 'to have in some sort unveiled human nature to
+herself.' If the cruelty of old manners has abated, do we not owe the
+improvement to such courageous priests as Ambrose, who refused admission
+into the church to Theodosius, because in punishing a guilty city he had
+hearkened to the voice rather of wrath than of justice; or as that Pope
+who insisted that Lewis the Seventh should expiate by a rigorous penance
+the sack and burning of Vitry.[33] It is not to a Titus, a Trajanus, an
+Antoninus, that we owe the abolition of the bloody gladiatorial games;
+it is to Jesus Christ. Virtuous unbelievers have not seldom been the
+apostles of benevolence and humanity, but we rarely see them in the
+asylums of misery. Reason speaks, but it is religion that makes men act.
+How much dearer to us than the splendid monuments of antique taste,
+power, and greatness, are those Gothic edifices reared for the poor and
+the orphan, those far nobler monuments of the piety of Christian
+princes and the power of Christian faith. The rudeness of their
+architecture may wound the delicacy of our taste, but they will be ever
+beloved by feeling hearts. 'Let others admire in the retreat prepared
+for those who have sacrificed in battle their lives or their health for
+the State, all the gathered riches of the arts, displaying in the eyes
+of all the nations the magnificence of Lewis the Fourteenth, and
+carrying our renown to the level of that of Greece and Rome. What I will
+admire is such a use of those arts; the sublime glory of serving the
+weal of men raises them higher than they had ever been at Rome or at
+Athens.'
+
+[Footnote 33: See Martin's _Hist. de la France_, iii. 422. Or Morison's
+_Life of Saint Bernard_, bk. iii. ch. vi.]
+
+2. Let us turn from the action of the Christian faith in modifying the
+passions of the individual, to its influence upon societies of men. How
+has Christianity ameliorated the great art of government, with reference
+to the two characteristic aims of that art, the happiness of
+communities, and their stability? 'Nature has given all men the right of
+being happy,' but the old lawgivers abandoned nature's wise economy, by
+which she uses the desires and interests of individuals to fulfil her
+general plans and ensure the common weal. Men like Lycurgus destroyed
+all idea of property, violated the laws of modesty, and annihilated the
+tenderest ties of blood. A false and mischievous spirit of system
+seduced them away from the true method, the feeling after
+experience.[34] A general injustice reigned in the laws of all nations;
+among all of them what was called the public good was confined to a
+small number of men. Love of country was less the love of
+fellow-citizens than a common hatred towards strangers. Hence the
+barbarities practised by the ancients upon their slaves, hence that
+custom of slavery once spread over the whole earth, those horrible
+cruelties in the wars of the Greeks and the Romans, that barbarous
+inequality between the two sexes which still reigns in the East; hence
+the tyranny of the great towards the common people in hereditary
+aristocracies, the profound degradation of subject peoples. In short,
+everywhere the stronger have made the laws and have crushed the weak;
+and if they have sometimes consulted the interests of a given society,
+they have always forgotten those of the human race. To recall right and
+justice, a principle was necessary that could raise men above themselves
+and all around them, that could lead them to survey all nations and all
+conditions with an equitable gaze, and in some sort with the eyes of God
+himself. This is what religion has done. What other principle could have
+fought and vanquished both interests and prejudice united?
+
+[Footnote 34: _Les hommes en tout ne s'eclairent que par le tatonnement
+de l'experience._ P. 593.]
+
+Nothing but the Christian religion could have worked that general
+revolution in men's minds, which brought the rights of humanity out into
+full day, and reconciled an affectionate preference for the community of
+which one makes a part, with a general love for mankind. Even the
+horrors of war were softened, and humanity began to be spared such
+frightful sequels of triumph, as towns burnt to ashes, populations put
+to the sword, the wounded massacred in cold blood, or reserved to give a
+ghastly decoration to triumph. Slavery, where it was not abolished, was
+constantly and effectively mitigated by Christian sentiment, and the
+fact that the Church did not peremptorily insist on its universal
+abolition was due to a wise reluctance to expose the constitution of
+society to so sudden and violent a shock. Christianity without formal
+precepts, merely by inspiring a love of justice and mercy in men's
+hearts, prevented the laws from becoming an instrument of oppression,
+and held a balance between the strong and the feeble.
+
+If the history of the ancient republics shows that they hardly knew the
+difference between liberty and anarchy, and if even the profound
+Aristotle seemed unable to reconcile monarchy with a mild government, is
+not the reason to be found in the fact that before the Christian era,
+the various governments of the world only presented either an ambition
+without bound or limit, or else a blind passion for independence? a
+perpetual balance between oppression on the one side, and revolt on the
+other? In vain did lawgivers attempt to arrest this incessant struggle
+of conflicting passions by laws which were too weak for the purpose,
+because they were in too imperfect an accord with opinions and manners.
+Religion, by placing man under the eyes of an all-seeing God, imposed on
+human passions the only rein capable of effectually bridling them. It
+gave men internal laws, that were stronger than all the external bonds
+of the civil laws. By means of this internal change, it has everywhere
+had the effect of weakening despotism, so that the limits of
+Christianity seem to mark also the limits of mild government and public
+felicity. Kings saw the supreme tribunal of a God who should judge them
+and the cause of their people. Thus the distance between them and their
+subjects became as nothing in the infinite distance between kings and
+subjects alike, and the divinity that was equally elevated above either.
+They were both in some sort equalised by a common abasement. 'Ye
+nations, be subject to authority,' cried the voice of religion to the
+one; and to the other it cried, 'Ye kings, who judge the earth, learn
+that God has only entrusted you with the image of power for the
+happiness of your peoples.'
+
+An eloquent description of the efficacy of Christianity in raising human
+nature, and impressing on kings the obligation of pursuing above all
+things the wellbeing of their subjects, closes with a courtly official
+salutation of the virtues of that Very Christian King, Lewis the
+Fifteenth.
+
+       *     *     *     *     *
+
+'It is ill reasoning against religion,' an illustrious contemporary of
+Turgot's had said, in a deprecatory sentence that serves to mark the
+spirit of the time; 'to compile a long list of the evils which it has
+inflicted, without doing the same for the blessings which it has
+bestowed.'[35] Conversely we may well think it unphilosophical and
+unconvincing to enumerate all the blessings without any of the evils; to
+tell us how the Christian doctrine enlarged the human spirit, without
+observing what narrowing limitations it imposed; to dwell on all the
+mitigating influences with which the Christian churches have been
+associated, while forgetting all the ferocities which they have
+inspired. The history of European belief offers a double record since
+the decay of polytheism, and if for a certain number of centuries this
+record shows the civilisation of men's instincts by Christianity, it
+reveals to us in the centuries subsequent, the reverse process of the
+civilisation of Christianity by men's instincts. Turgot's piece treats
+half the subject as if it were the whole. He extends down to the middle
+of the eighteenth century a number of propositions and implied
+inferences, which are only true up to the beginning of the fourteenth.
+
+[Footnote 35: _Esprit des Lois_, bk. xxiv. ch. ii.]
+
+Even within this limitation there are many questions that no student of
+Turgot's capacity would now overlook, yet of which he and the most
+reasonable spirits of his age took no cognisance. The men of neither
+side in the eighteenth century knew what the history of opinion meant.
+All alike concerned themselves with its truth or falsehood, with what
+they counted to be its abstract fitness or unfitness. A perfect method
+places a man where he can command one point of view as well as the
+other, and can discern not only how far an idea is true and convenient,
+but also how, whether true and convenient or otherwise, it came into its
+place in men's minds. We ought to be able to separate in thought the
+question of the grounds and evidence for a given dogma being true, from
+the distinct and purely historic question of the social and intellectual
+conditions which made men accept it for true.
+
+Where, however, there was any question of the two religions whose
+document and standards are professedly drawn from the Bible, there the
+Frenchmen of that time assumed not a historic attitude, but one
+exclusively dogmatic. Everybody was so anxious to prove, that he had
+neither freedom nor humour to observe. The controversy as to the exact
+measure of the supernatural force in Judaism and its Christian
+development was so overwhelmingly absorbing, as to leave without light
+or explanation the wide and independent region of their place as simply
+natural forces. It may be said, and perhaps it is true, that people
+never allow the latter side of the inquiry to become prominent in their
+minds until they have settled the former, and settled it in one way:
+they must be indifferent to the details of the natural operations of a
+religion, until they are convinced that there are none of any other
+kind. Be this as it may, we have to record the facts. And it is
+difficult to imagine a Frenchman of the era of the Encyclopaedia asking
+himself the sort of questions which now present themselves to the
+student in such abundance. For instance, has one effect of Christianity
+been to exalt a regard for the Sympathetic over the AEsthetic side of
+action and character? And if so, to what elements in the forms of
+Christian teaching and practice is this due? And is such a transfer of
+the highest place from the beauty to the lovableness of conduct to be
+accounted a gain, when contrasted with the relative position of the two
+sides among the Greeks and Romans?
+
+Again, we have to draw a distinction between the Christian idea and the
+outward Christian organisation, and between the consequences to human
+nature and society which flowed from the first, and the advantages which
+may be traced to the second. There was on the one hand a doctrine,
+stirring dormant spiritual instincts, and satisfying active spiritual
+needs; on the other an external institution, preserving, interpreting,
+developing, and applying the doctrine. Each of the two has its own
+origin, its own history, its own destiny in the memories of the race. We
+may attempt to estimate the functions of the one, without pronouncing on
+the exact value of the other. If the idea was the direct gift of heaven,
+the policy was due to the sagacity and mother-wit of the great
+ecclesiastical statesmen. If the doctrine was a supernatural boon, at
+least the forms in which it came gradually to overspread Europe were to
+be explained on rational and natural grounds. And if historical
+investigation of these forms and their influences should prove that they
+are the recognisable roots of most of the benign growths which are
+vaguely styled results of Christianity, then such a conclusion would
+seriously attenuate the merits of the supernatural Christian doctrine in
+favour of the human Christian policy.
+
+If there had been in the Christian idea the mysterious self-sowing
+quality so constantly claimed for it, how came it that in the Eastern
+part of the Empire it was as powerless for spiritual or moral
+regeneration as it was for political health and vitality, while in the
+Western part it became the organ of the most important of all the past
+transformations of the civilised world? Is not the difference to be
+explained by the difference in the surrounding medium, and what is the
+effect of such an explanation upon the supernatural claims of the
+Christian idea? Does such an explanation reduce that idea to the rank of
+one of the historic forces, which arise and operate and expand
+themselves in accordance with strictly natural conditions? The
+Christianity of the East was probably as degraded a form of belief, as
+lowering for human character, and as mischievous to social wellbeing, as
+has ever been held by civilised peoples. Yet the East, strangely enough,
+was the great home and nursery of all that is most distinctive in the
+constituent ideas of the Christian faith. Why, in meditating on
+Christianity, are we to shut our eyes to the depravation that overtook
+it when placed amid unfavourable social conditions, and to confine our
+gaze to the brighter qualities which it developed in the healthier
+atmosphere of the West?
+
+Further, Turgot might have asked with much profit to the cause of
+historic truth, and perhaps in more emancipated years he did ask,
+whether economic circumstances have not had more to do with the
+dissolution of slavery than Christian doctrines:--whether the rise of
+rent from free tenants over the profits to be drawn from slave-labour by
+the landowner, has not been a more powerful stimulant to emancipation,
+than the moral maxim that we ought to love one another, or the Christian
+proposition that we are all equals before the divine throne and co-heirs
+of salvation:--whether a steady and permanent fall in the price of
+slave-raised productions had not as much to do with the decay of slavery
+in Europe, as the love of God or the doctrine of human brotherhood.[36]
+That the influence of Christianity, so far as it went, and, so far as it
+was a real power, tended both to abolish slavery, and, where it was too
+feeble to press in this direction, at any rate tended to mitigate the
+harshness of its usages, is hardly to be denied by any fair-minded
+person. The true issue is what this influence amounted to. The orthodox
+historian treats it as single and omnipotent. His heterodox brother--in
+the eighteenth century they both usually belonged to one family--leaves
+it out.
+
+[Footnote 36: See on this subject Finlay's _Mediaeval Greece and
+Trebizond_, p. 197; and also, on the other hand, p. 56.]
+
+The crowded annals of human misology, as well as the more terrible
+chronicle of the consequences when misology has impatiently betaken
+itself to the cruel arm of flesh, show the decisive importance of the
+precise way in which a great subject of debate is put. Now the whole
+question of religion was in those days put with radical incompleteness,
+and Turgot's dissertation was only in a harmony that might have been
+expected with the prevailing error. The champions of authority, like the
+leaders of the revolt, insisted on inquiring absolutely, not relatively;
+on judging religion with reference to human nature in the abstract,
+instead of with reference to the changing varieties of social
+institution and circumstance. We ought to place ourselves where we can
+see both lines of inquiry to be possible. We ought to place ourselves
+where we can ask what the tendencies of Christian influence have been,
+without mixing up with that question the further and distinct inquiry
+what these tendencies are now, or are likely to be. The nineteenth
+century has hitherto leaned to the historical and relative aspect of the
+great controversy. The eighteenth was characteristically dogmatic, and
+the destroyers of the faith were not any less dogmatic in their own way,
+than those who professed to be its apologists.
+
+       *     *     *     *     *
+
+Probably it was not long after the composition of this apologetic
+thesis, before Turgot became alive to the precise position of a creed
+which had come to demand apologetic theses. This was, indeed, one of the
+marked and critical moments in the great transformation of religious
+feeling and ecclesiastical order in Europe, of which our own age, four
+generations later, is watching a very decisive, if not a final stage.
+Turgot's demonstration of the beneficence of Christianity was delivered
+in July 1750--almost the exact middle of the eighteenth century. The
+death of the Emperor Charles the Sixth, ten years before, had given the
+signal for the break-up of the European system. The iron army of Prussia
+made its first stride out of the narrow northern borders, into the broad
+arena of the West, and every new illustration of the fortitude and depth
+and far-reaching power of Prussia has been a new blow to the old
+Catholic organisation. The first act of this prodigious drama closed
+while Turgot was a pupil at the Sorbonne. The court of France had
+blundered into alliances against the retrograde and Catholic house of
+Austria, while England, with equal blindness, had stumbled into
+friendship with it. Before the opening of the second act or true
+climax--that is, before the Seven Years' War began--interests and forces
+became more naturally adjusted. France, Spain, and Austria, Bourbons and
+Hapsburgs, the great pillars of the Church, were ranged against England
+and Prussia, the half-conscious representatives of those industrial and
+individualist principles which replaced, whether for a time or
+permanently, the decaying system of aristocratic caste in temporal
+things, and an ungrowing Catholicism in things spiritual. In 1750
+ecclesiastical far-sightedness, court intrigue, and family ambitions,
+were actively preparing the way for the Austrian alliance in the
+mephitic air of Versailles. The issue at stake was the maintenance of
+the supremacy of the Church, and the ancient Christian organisation of
+France and of Europe.
+
+We now know how this long battle has gone. The Jesuit Churchmen lost
+their lead, and were thrown back out of the civil and political sphere.
+We know, too, what effect these blows to the Catholic organisation have
+had upon the activity of the Catholic idea. With the decline and
+extermination of the predominance of Churchmen in civil affairs, there
+began a tendency, which has since become deeper and stronger, in the
+Church to withdraw herself and her sons from a sphere where she could no
+longer be sovereign and queen. Religion, since the Revolution, isolates
+the most devout Catholics from political action and political interests.
+This great change, however, this return of the leaders of the Christian
+society upon the original conceptions of the Christian faith, did not
+come to pass in Turgot's time. He watched the struggle of the Church for
+the maintenance of its temporal privilege and honour, and for the
+continued protection by secular power of its spiritual supremacy. The
+outcome of the struggle was later.
+
+We may say, in fine, that if this first public composition of Turgot's
+is extremely imperfect, it was better to exaggerate the services of
+Christianity, alike as an internal faith and as a peculiar form of
+social organisation, than to describe Gregory the Great and Innocent,
+Hildebrand and Bernard, as artful and vulgar tyrants, and Aquinas and
+Roger Bacon as the products of a purely barbarous, stationary, and dark
+age. There is at first sight something surprising in the respect which
+Turgot's ablest contemporaries paid to the contributions made to
+progress by Greece and Rome, compared with their angry disparagement of
+the dark ages. The reason of this contrast we soon discover to be that
+the passions of present contests gave their own colour to men's
+interpretation of the circumstances of the remote middle time, between
+the Roman Empire and the commencement of the revolutionary period.
+Turgot escaped these passions more completely than any man of his time
+who was noble enough to be endowed with the capacity for passion. He
+never forgot that it is as wise and just to confess the obligations of
+mankind to the Catholic monotheism of the West, as it is shallow and
+unjust in professors of Christianity to despise or hate the lower
+theological systems which guide the humbler families of mankind.
+
+Let us observe that only three years after this academic discourse in
+praise of the religion of the time, Turgot was declaring that 'the
+greatest of the services of Christianity to the world was that it had
+both enlightened and propagated _natural religion_.'[37]
+
+[Footnote 37: _Lettres sur la Tolerance_, II. vol. ii. 687.]
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+Turgot's inquiry into the extent and quality of the debt of European
+civilisation to Christianity was marked by a certain breadth and
+largeness, in spite of the bonds of circumstance and subject--for who,
+after all, can consider Christianity to any purpose, apart from other
+conditions of general progress, or without free comparison with other
+dogmatic systems? It is not surprising, then, to find the same valuable
+gifts of vision coming into play with a thousand times greater liberty
+and power, when the theme was widened so as to comprehend the successive
+steps of the advancement of the human mind in all its aspects. The
+Second and more famous of the two Discourses at the Sorbonne was read in
+December 1750, and professes to treat the Successive Advances of the
+Human Mind.[38] The opening lines are among the most pregnant, as they
+were among the most original, in the history of literature, and reveal
+in an outline, standing clear against the light, a thought which
+revolutionised old methods of viewing and describing the course of human
+affairs, and contained the germs of a new and most fruitful philosophy
+of society.
+
+[Footnote 38: Sur les progres successifs de l'esprit humain. _OEuv._
+ii. 597-611.]
+
+'The phenomena of nature, subjected as they are to constant laws, are
+enclosed in a circle of revolutions that remain the same for ever. All
+comes to life again, all perishes again; and in these successive
+generations, by which vegetables and animals reproduce themselves, time
+does no more than bring back at each moment the image of what it has
+just dismissed.
+
+'The succession of men, on the contrary, offers from age to age a
+spectacle of continual variations. Reason, freedom, the passions, are
+incessantly producing new events. _All epochs are fastened together by a
+sequence of causes and effects, linking the condition of the world to
+all the conditions that have gone before it._ The gradually multiplied
+signs of speech and writing, giving men an instrument for making sure of
+the continued possession of their ideas, as well as of imparting them to
+others, have formed out of the knowledge of each individual a common
+treasure, which generation transmits to generation, as an inheritance
+constantly augmented by the discoveries of each age; and the human race,
+observed from its first beginning, seems in the eyes of the philosopher
+to be one vast whole, which, like each individual in it, has its infancy
+and its growth.'
+
+This was not a mere casual reflection in Turgot's mind, taking a
+solitary and separate position among those various and unordered ideas,
+which spring up and go on existing without visible fruit in every active
+intelligence. It was one of the systematic conceptions which shape and
+rule many groups of facts, fixing a new and high place of their own for
+them among the great divisions of knowledge. In a word, it belonged to
+the rare order of truly creative ideas, and was the root or germ of a
+whole body of vigorous and connected thought. This quality marks the
+distinction, in respect of the treatment of history, between Turgot, and
+both Bossuet and the great writers of history in France and England in
+the eighteenth century. Many of the sayings to which we are referred for
+the origin of the modern idea of history, such as Pascal's for instance,
+are the fortuitous glimpses of men of genius into a vast sea, whose
+extent they have not been led to suspect, and which only make a passing
+and momentary mark. Bossuet's talk of universal history, which has been
+so constantly praised, was fundamentally, and in substance, no more than
+a bit of theological commonplace splendidly decorated. He did indeed
+speak of 'the concatenation of human affairs,' but only in the same
+sentence with 'the sequence of the counsels of God.' The gorgeous
+rhetorician of the Church was not likely to rise philosophically into
+the larger air of universal history, properly so called. His famous
+Discourse is a vindication of divine foresight, by means of an intensely
+narrow survey of such sets of facts as might be thought not inconsistent
+with the deity's fixed purpose to make one final and decisive revelation
+to men. No one who looks upon the vast assemblage of stupendous human
+circumstances, from the first origin of man upon the earth, as merely
+the ordained antecedent of what, seen from the long procession of all
+the ages, figures in so diminutive a consummation as the Catholic
+Church, is likely to obtain a very effective hold of that broad sequence
+and many-linked chain of events, to which Bossuet gave a right name, but
+whose real meaning he never was even near seizing. His merit is that he
+did in a small and rhetorical way what Montesquieu and Voltaire
+afterwards did in a truly comprehensive and philosophical way; he
+pressed forward general ideas in connection with the recorded movements
+of the chief races of mankind. For a teacher of history to leave the
+bare chronicler's road so far as to declare, for example, the general
+principle, inadequate and over-stated as it is, that 'religion and civil
+government are the two points on which human things revolve,'--even this
+was a clear step in advance. The dismissal of the long series of
+emperors from Augustus to Alexander Severus in two or three pages was to
+show a ripe sense of large historic proportion. Again, Bossuet's
+expressions of 'the concatenation of the universe,' of the
+interdependence of the parts of so vast a whole, of there coming no
+great change without having its causes in foregoing centuries, and of
+the true object of history being to observe, in connection with each
+epoch, those secret dispositions of events which prepared the way for
+great changes, as well as the momentous conjunctures which more
+immediately brought them to pass[39]--all these phrases seem to point to
+a true and philosophic survey. But they end in themselves, and lead
+nowhither. The chain is an arbitrary and one-sided collection of facts.
+The writer does not cautiously follow and feel after the successive
+links, but forges and chooses and arrays them after a pattern of his
+own, which was fixed independently of them. A scientific term or two is
+not enough to disguise the purely theological essence of the treatise.
+
+[Footnote 39: _Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle_, part iii. ch. ii.]
+
+Montesquieu and Voltaire were both far enough removed from Bossuet's
+point of view, and the _Spirit of Laws_ of the one, and the _Essay on
+the Manners and Character of Nations_ of the other, mark a very
+different way of considering history from the lofty and confident method
+of the orthodox rhetorician. The _Spirit of Laws_ was published in 1748,
+that is to say a couple of years before Turgot's Discourse at the
+Sorbonne. Voltaire's _Essay on Manners_ did not come out until 1757, or
+seven years later than the Discourse; but Voltaire himself has told us
+that its composition dates from 1740, when he prepared this new
+presentation of European history for the service of Madame du
+Chatelet.[40] We may hence fairly consider the cardinal work of
+Montesquieu, and the cardinal historical work of Voltaire, as virtually
+belonging to the same time. And they possess a leading character in
+common, which separates them both from Turgot, and places them
+relatively to his idea in a secondary rank. In a word, Montesquieu and
+Voltaire, if we have to search their most distinctive quality,
+introduced into history systematically, and with full and decisive
+effect, a broad generality of treatment. They grouped the facts of
+history; and they did not group them locally or in accordance with mere
+geographical or chronological division, but collected the facts in
+social classes and orders from many countries and times. Their work was
+a work of classification. It showed the possibility of arranging the
+manifold and complex facts of society, and of the movements of
+communities, under heads and with reference to definite general
+conditions.
+
+[Footnote 40: Preface to _Essai sur les Moeurs_, _OEuv._ xx.]
+
+There is no need here to enter into any criticism of Montesquieu's great
+work, how far the merits of its execution equalled the merit of its
+design, how far his vicious confusion of the senses of the word 'law'
+impaired the worth of his book, as a contribution to inductive or
+comparative history. We have only to seek the difference between the
+philosophic conception of Montesquieu and the philosophic conception of
+Turgot. The latter may be considered a more liberal completion of the
+former. Turgot not only sees the operation of law in the movements and
+institutions of society, but he interprets this law in a positive and
+scientific sense, as an ascertainable succession of social states, each
+of them being the cause and effect of other social states. Turgot gives
+its deserved prominence to the fertile idea of there being an ordered
+movement of growth or advance among societies; in other words, of the
+civilisation of any given portion of mankind having fixed conditions
+analogous to those of a physical organism. Finally, he does not limit
+his thought by fixing it upon the laws and constitutions only of
+countries, but refers historical philosophy to its veritable and widest
+object and concern, the steps and conditions of the progression of the
+human mind.
+
+How, he inquires, can we seize the thread of the progress of the human
+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.
+
+Turgot was one of the men to whom good government is a religion. It
+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.
+
+Apart from these, the greatest and most difficult of all Turgot's
+administrative reforms, we may notice in passing his assiduity in
+watching for the smaller opportunities of making life easier to the
+people of his province. His private benevolence was incessant and
+marked. One case of its exercise carries our minds at a word into the
+very midst of the storm of fire which purified France of the evil and
+sordid elements, that now and for his life lay like a mountain of lead
+on all Turgot's aims and efforts. A certain foreign contractor at
+Limoges was ruined by the famine of 1770. He had a clever son, whom
+Turgot charitably sent to school, and afterwards to college in Paris.
+The youth grew up to be the most eloquent and dazzling of the Girondins,
+the high-souled Vergniaud. It was not, however, in good works of merely
+private destination that Turgot mostly exercised himself. In 1767 the
+district was infested by wolves. The Intendant imposed a small tax for
+the purpose of providing rewards for the destruction of these
+tormentors, and in reading the minutes on the subject we are reminded of
+the fact, which was not without its significance when the peasants rose
+in vengeance on their lords two and twenty years later, that the
+dispersion of the hamlets and the solitude of the farms had made it
+customary for the people to go about with fire-arms. Besides encouraging
+the destruction of noxious beasts, Turgot did something for the
+preservation of beasts not noxious. The first veterinary school in
+France had been founded at Lyons in 1762. To this he sent pupils from
+his province, and eventually he founded a similar school at Limoges. He
+suppressed a tax on cattle, which acted prejudicially on breeding and
+grazing; and he introduced clover into the grass-lands. The potato had
+been unknown in Limousin. It was not common in any part of France; and
+perhaps this is not astonishing when we remember that the first field
+crop even in agricultural Scotland is supposed only to have been sown in
+the fourth decade of that century. People would not touch it, though
+the experiment of persuading them to cultivate this root had been
+frequently tried. In the Limousin the people were even more obstinate in
+their prejudice than elsewhere. But Turgot persevered, knowing how
+useful potatoes would be in a land where scarcity of grain was so
+common. The ordinary view was that they were hardly fit for pigs, and
+that in human beings they would certainly breed leprosy. Some of the
+English Puritans would not eat potatoes because they are not mentioned
+in the Bible, and that is perhaps no better a reason than the other.
+When, however, it was seen that the Intendant had the hated vegetable
+served every day at his own table, the opposition grew more faint; men
+were at last brought to consent to use potatoes for their cattle, and
+after a time even for themselves.
+
+It need scarcely be said that among Turgot's efforts for agricultural
+improvement, was the foundation of an agricultural society. This was the
+time when the passion for provincial academies of all sorts was at its
+height. When we consider that Turgot's society was not practical but
+deliberative, and what themes he proposed for discussion by it, we may
+believe that it was one of the less useful of his works. What the
+farmers needed was something much more directly instructive in the
+methods of their business, than could come of discussions as to the
+effects of indirect taxation on the revenues of landowners, or the right
+manner of valuing the income of land in the different kinds of
+cultivation. 'In that most unlucky path of French exertion,' says Arthur
+Young, 'this distinguished patriot was able to do nothing. This society
+does like other societies; they meet, converse, offer premiums, and
+publish nonsense. This is not of much consequence, for the people
+instead of reading their memoirs are not able to read at all. They can,
+however, _see_, and if a farm was established in that good cultivation
+which they ought to copy, something would be presented from which they
+_might_ learn. I asked particularly if the members of this society had
+land in their own hands, and was assured that they had; but the
+conversation presently explained it. They had _metayers_ round their
+country seats, and this was considered as farming their own lands, so
+that they assume something of a merit from the identical circumstance,
+which is the curse and ruin of the whole country.'
+
+The record of what Turgot did for manufacturing industry and commerce is
+naturally shorter than that of his efforts for the relief of the land
+and its cultivators. In the eyes of the modern economist, with his
+horror of government encouragement to industry, no matter in what time,
+place, or circumstance, some of Turgot's actions will seem of doubtful
+wisdom. At Brives, for example, with all the authority of an Intendant,
+he urged the citizens to provide buildings for carrying on a certain
+manufacture which he and others thought would be profitable to the town;
+and, as the money for the buildings did not come in very readily, he
+levied a rate both on the town and on the inhabitants of the suburbs.
+His argument was that the new works would prove indirectly beneficial to
+the whole neighbourhood. He was not long, however, in finding out, as
+the authors of such a policy generally find out, how difficult it is to
+reconcile the interests of aided manufactures with those of the
+taxpayers. It is characteristic, we may remark, of the want of public
+spirit in the great nobles, that one of Turgot's first difficulties in
+the affair was to defeat an unjust claim made by no less a personage
+than the Marshal de Noailles, to a piece of public land on which the
+proposed works were to be built. A more important industry in the
+history of Limoges sprang from the discovery, during Turgot's tenure of
+office, of the china clay which has now made the porcelain of Limoges
+only second among the French potteries to that of Sevres itself. The
+modern pottery has been developed since the close of the Revolution,
+which checked the establishments and processes that had been directed,
+encouraged, and supervised by Turgot.
+
+To his superior enlightenment in another part of the commercial field we
+owe one of the most excellent of Turgot's pieces, his Memorial on Loans
+of Money. This plea for free trade in money has all the sense and
+liberality of the brightest side of the eighteenth century illumination.
+It was suggested by the following circumstance. At Angouleme four or
+five rogues associated together, and drew bills on one another. On these
+bills they borrowed money, the average rate of interest being from
+eight to ten per cent. When the bills fell due, instead of paying them,
+they laid informations against the lenders for taking more than the
+legal rate of interest. The lenders were ruined, persons who had money
+were afraid to make advances, bills were protested, commercial credit
+was broken, and the trade of the district was paralysed. Turgot
+prevailed upon the Council of State to withdraw the cases from the local
+jurisdiction; the proceedings against the lenders were annulled, and the
+institution of similar proceedings forbidden. This was a characteristic
+course. The royal government was generally willing in the latter half of
+the eighteenth century to redress a given case of abuse, but it never
+felt itself strong enough, or had leisure enough, to deal with the
+general source from which the particular grievance sprang. Turgot's
+Memorial is as cogent an exposure of the mischief of Usury Laws to the
+public prosperity, as the more renowned pages either of Bentham or J. B.
+Say on the same subject, and it has the merit of containing an
+explanation at once singularly patient and singularly intelligent, of
+the origin of the popular feeling about usury and its adoption by the
+legislator.
+
+After he had been eight years at his post, Turgot was called upon to
+deal with the harassing problems of a scarcity of food. In 1770 even the
+maize and black grain, and the chestnuts on which the people supported
+life, failed almost completely, and the failure extended over two years.
+The scarcity very speedily threatened to become a famine, and all its
+conditions were exasperated by the unwisdom of the authorities, and the
+selfish rapacity of the landlords. It needed all the firmness and all
+the circumspection of which Turgot was capable, to overcome the
+difficulties which the strong forces of ignorance, prejudice, and
+greediness raised up against him.
+
+His first battle was on an issue which is painfully familiar to our own
+Indian administrators at the present time. In 1764, an edict had been
+promulgated decreeing free trade in grain, not with foreign countries,
+but among the different provinces of the kingdom. This edict had not
+made much way in the minds either of the local officials or of the
+people at large, and the presence of famine made the free and
+unregulated export of food seem no better than a cruel and outrageous
+paradox. The parlement of Bordeaux at once suspended the edict of 1764.
+They ordered that all dealers in grain, farmers of land, owners of land,
+of whatever rank, quality, or condition, should forthwith convey to the
+markets of their district '_a sufficient quantity_' of grain to
+provision the said markets. The same persons were forbidden to sell
+either by wholesale or retail any portion of the said grain at their own
+granaries. Turgot at once procured from the Council at Versailles the
+proper instrument for checking this impolitic interference with the free
+circulation of grain, and he contrived this instrument in such
+conciliatory terms as to avoid any breach with the parlement, whose
+motives, for that matter, were respectable enough. In spite, however,
+of the action of the government, popular feeling ran high against free
+markets. Tumultuous gatherings of famishing men and women menaced the
+unfortunate grain-dealers. Waggoners engaged in carrying grain away from
+a place where it was cheaper, to another place where it was dearer, were
+violently arrested in their business, and terrified from proceeding.
+Hunger prevented people from discerning the unanswerable force of the
+argument that if the grain commanded a higher price somewhere else, that
+was a sure sign of the need there being more dire. The local officials
+were as hostile as their humbler neighbours. At the town of Turenne,
+they forbade grain to be taken away, and forced the owners of it to sell
+it on the spot at the market rate. At the town of Angouleme the
+lieutenant of police took upon himself to order that all the grain
+destined for the Limousin should be unloaded and stored at Angouleme.
+Turgot brought a heavy hand to bear on these breakers of administrative
+discipline, and readily procured such sanction as his authority needed
+from the Council.
+
+One of the most interesting of the measures to which Turgot resorted in
+meeting the destitution of the country, was the establishment of the
+Charitable Workshops. Some of the advocates of the famous National
+Workshops of 1848 have appealed to this example of the severe patriot,
+for a sanction to their own economic policy. It is not clear that the
+logic of the Socialist is here more remorseless than usual. If the State
+may set up workshops to aid people who are short of food because the
+harvest has failed, why should it not do the same when people are short
+of food because trade is bad, work scarce, and wages intolerably low? Of
+course Turgot's answer would have been that remorseless logic is the
+most improper instrument in the world for a business of rough
+expedients, such as government is. There is a vital difference in
+practice between opening a public workshop in the exceptional emergency
+of a famine, and keeping public workshops open as a normal interference
+with the free course of industrial activity. For the moment the
+principle may appear to be the same, but in reality the application of
+the principle means in the latter case the total disorganisation of
+industry; in the former it means no more than a temporary breach of the
+existing principles of organisation, with a view to its speedier
+revival. To invoke Turgot as a dabbler in Socialism because he opened
+_ateliers de charite_, is as unreasonable as it would be to make an
+English minister who should suspend the Bank Charter Act in a crisis,
+into the champion of an inconvertible paper currency. Turgot always
+regarded the sums paid in his works, not as wages, but as alms. All that
+he urged was that 'the best and most useful kind of alms consists in
+providing means for earning them.' To prevent the workers from earning
+aid with as little trouble to themselves as possible, he recommended
+payment by the piece and not by the day. To check workers from flocking
+in from their regular employments, he insisted on the wages being kept
+below the ordinary rate, and he urged the propriety of driving as sharp
+bargains as possible in fixing the price of the piece of work. To
+prevent the dissipation of earnings at the tavern, he paid not in money,
+but in leathern tokens, that were only current in exchange for
+provisions. All these regulations mark a wide gulf between the Economist
+of 1770 and the Socialist of 1848. Nobody was sterner than Turgot
+against beggars, the inevitable scourge of every country where the evils
+of vicious economic arrangements are aggravated by the mischievous views
+of the Catholic clergy, first, as to the duties of promiscuous
+almsgiving, and second, as to the virtue of improvident marriages. In
+1614 the States General had been for hanging all mendicants, and Colbert
+had sent them to the galleys. Turgot was less rigorous than that, but he
+would not suffer his efforts for the economic restoration of his
+province to be thwarted by the influx of these devouring parasites, and
+he sent every beggar on whom hands could be laid to prison.
+
+The story of the famine in the Limousin brings to light some instructive
+facts as to the temper of the lords and rich proprietors on the eve of
+the changes that were to destroy them. Turgot had been specially anxious
+that as much as possible of what was necessary for the relief of
+distress should be done by private persons. He knew the straits of the
+government. He knew how hard it would be to extract from it the means of
+repairing a deficit in his own finances. Accordingly he invited the
+landowners, not merely to contribute sums of money in return for the
+public works carried on in their neighbourhood, but also, by way of
+providing employment to their indigent neighbours, to undertake such
+works as they should find convenient on their own estates. The response
+was disappointing. 'The districts,' he wrote in 1772, 'where I have
+works on foot, do not give me reason to hope for much help on the side
+of the generosity of the nobles and the rich landowners. The Prince de
+Soubise is so far the only person who has given anything for the works
+that have been executed in his duchy.' Nor was abstinence from
+generosity the worst part of this failure in public spirit. The same
+nobles and landowners who refused to give, did not refuse to take away.
+Most of them proceeded at once to dismiss their _metayers_, the people
+who farmed their lands in consideration of a fixed proportion of the
+produce. Turgot, in an ordinance of admirable gravity, remonstrated
+against this harsh and impolitic proceeding. He pointed out that the
+unfortunate wretches, thus stripped of every resource, would have to
+leave the district, abandoning their wives and children to the charity
+of villages that were already overburdened with the charge of their own
+people. To cast this additional load on the villages was all the more
+unjust, because the owners of land had been exempted from one-half of
+the taxes levied on the owners of other property, exactly because the
+former were expected to provide for their own peasants. It was a claim
+less of humanity than of bare justice, that the landowners should do
+something for men with whom their relations had been so close as to be
+almost domestic, and to whose hard toil their masters owed all that they
+possessed. As a mere matter of self-interest, moreover, apart alike from
+both justice and humanity, the death or flight of the labourers would
+leave the proprietors helpless when the next good season came, and for
+want of hands the land would be doomed to barrenness for years to come,
+to the grievous detriment no less of the landowners than of the whole
+people of the realm. Accordingly, Turgot ordered all those who had
+dismissed their _metayers_ to take them back again, and he enacted
+generally that all proprietors, of whatever quality or condition, and
+whether privileged or not, should be bound to keep and support until the
+next harvest all the labourers who had been on their land in the
+previous October, as well women and children as men.
+
+Turgot's policy in this matter is more instructive as to the social
+state of France, than it may at first sight appear. At first sight we
+are astonished to find the austere economist travelling so far from the
+orthodox path of free contract as to order a landowner to furnish at his
+own cost subsistence for his impoverished tenants. But the truth is that
+the _metayer_ was not a free tenant in the sense which we attach to the
+word. '_In Limousin_,' says Arthur Young, '_the metayers are considered
+as little better than menial servants_.' And it is not going beyond the
+evidence to say that they were even something lower than menial
+servants; they were really a kind of serf-caste. They lived in the
+lowest misery. More than half of them were computed to be deeply in debt
+to the proprietors. In many cases they were even reduced every year to
+borrow from their landlord, before the harvest came round, such coarse
+bread of mixed rye and barley as he might choose to lend them. What
+Turgot therefore had in his mind was no relation of free contract,
+though it was that legally, but a relation which partly resembled that
+of a feudal lord to his retainer, and partly--as Sir Henry Maine has
+hinted--that of a planter to his negroes. It is less surprising, then,
+that Turgot should have enforced some of the responsibilities of the
+lord and the planter.
+
+The nobles had resort to a still more indefensible measure than the
+expulsion of their _metayers_. Most of the lands in the Generality of
+Limoges were charged with dues in kind payable to the lords. As the
+cultivators had for the most part no grain even for their own bread,
+they naturally had no grain for the lord's dues. The lords then insisted
+on payment in cash, and they insisted on estimating this payment at the
+famine price of the grain. Most of them were really as needy as they
+were idle and proud, and nothing is so inordinately grasping as the
+indigence of class-pride. The effect of their proceedings now was to
+increase their revenue fourfold and fivefold out of public calamity and
+universal misery. And unfortunately the liability of the cultivators in
+a given manor was _solidaire_; they were jointly and severally
+responsible, and the effect of this was that even those who were in
+circumstances to pay the quadrupled dues, were ruined and destroyed
+without mercy in consequence of having also to pay the quadrupled dues
+of their beggared neighbours. Turgot arrested this odious process by
+means of an old and forgotten decree, which he prevailed upon the
+parlement of Bordeaux to revive in good and due form, to the effect that
+the arrears of dues in kind for 1769 should be paid at the market price
+of grain when the dues were payable; that is, before the scarcity had
+declared itself.
+
+When we consider the grinding and extortionate spirit thus shown in face
+of a common calamity, we may cease to wonder at the ferocity with which,
+when the hour struck, the people tore away privilege, distinction, and
+property itself from classes that had used all three only to ruin the
+land and crush its inhabitants into the dust. And the moment that the
+lord had thus transformed himself into a mere creditor, and a creditor
+for goods delivered centuries ago, and long since consumed and
+forgotten, then it was certain that, if political circumstances favoured
+the growing economic sentiment, there would be heard again the old cry
+of the Roman plebs for an agrarian law and _novae tabulae_. Nay, something
+was heard that is amazingly like the cry of the modern Irish peasant. In
+1776 two noteworthy incidents happened. A certain Marquis de Vibraye
+threw into prison a peasant who refused to pay the _droit de cens_.
+Immediately between thirty and forty peasants came to the rescue, armed
+themselves, besieged the chateau, took it and sacked it, and drove the
+Marquis de Vibraye away in terror. Still more significant is the second
+incident, which happened shortly after. A relative of the Duke of
+Mortemart, shooting on his property, was attacked by peasants who
+insisted that he should cease his sport. They treated him with much
+brutality, and even threatened to fire on him and his attendants,
+'_claiming to be free masters of their lands_.' Here was the main root
+of the great French Revolution. A fair consideration of the details of
+such an undertaking as Turgot's administration of the Limousin helps us
+to understand two things: first, that all the ideas necessary for the
+pacific transformation of French society were there in the midst of it;
+second, that the system of privilege had fostered such a spirit in one
+class, and the reaction against the inconsiderate manifestation of that
+spirit was so violent in the other class, that good political ideas were
+vain and inapplicable.
+
+It is curious to find that, in the midst of his beneficent
+administration, Turgot was rating practical work very low in comparison
+with the achievements of the student and the thinker. 'You are very
+fortunate,' Condorcet said to him, 'in having a passion for the public
+good, and in being able to satisfy it; it is a great consolation, and of
+a very superior order to the consolation of mere study.' 'Nay,' replied
+Turgot, in his next letter, 'whatever you may say, I believe that the
+satisfaction derived from study is superior to any other kind of
+satisfaction. I am perfectly convinced that one may be, through study, a
+thousand times more useful to men than in any of our subordinate posts.
+There we torment ourselves, and often without any compensating success,
+to secure some small benefits, while we are the involuntary instrument
+of evils that are by no means small. All our small benefits are
+transitory, while the light that a man of letters is able to diffuse
+must, sooner or later, destroy all the artificial evils of the human
+race, and place it in a position to enjoy all the goods that nature
+offers.' It is clear that we can only accept Turgot's preference, on
+condition that the man of letters is engaged on work that seriously
+advances social interests and adds something to human stature. Most
+literature, nearly all literature, is distinctly subordinate and
+secondary; it only serves to pass the time of the learned or cultured
+class, without making any definite mark either on the mental habits of
+men and women, or on the institutions under which they live. Compared
+with such literature as this, the work of an administrator who makes
+life materially easier and more hopeful to the half-million of persons
+living in the Generality of Limoges or elsewhere, must be pronounced
+emphatically the worthier and more justly satisfactory.[44]
+
+[Footnote 44: See vol. i. p. 290.]
+
+Turgot himself, however, found time, in his industry at Limoges, to make
+a contribution to a kind of literature which has seriously modified the
+practical arrangements and social relations of the western world. In
+1766 he published his Essay on the Formation and Distribution of
+Wealth--a short but most pithy treatise, in which he anticipated some of
+the leading economic principles of that greater work by Adam Smith,
+which was given to the world ten years later. Turgot's Essay has none of
+the breadth of historic outlook, and none of the amplitude of concrete
+illustrations from real affairs, which make the Wealth of Nations so
+deeply fertile, so persuasive, so interesting, so thoroughly alive, so
+genuinely enriching to the understanding of the judicious reader. But
+the comparative dryness of Turgot's too concise form does not blind the
+historian of political economy to the merit of the substance of his
+propositions. It was no small proof of originality and enlightenment to
+precede Adam Smith by ten years in the doctrines of free trade, of free
+industry, of loans on interest, of the constitutive elements of price,
+of the effects of the division of labour, of the processes of the
+formation of capital. The passage on interest will bear reproducing once
+more:--'We may regard the rate of interest as a kind of level, below
+which all labour, all cultivation, all industry, all commerce ceases. It
+is like a sea spreading out over a vast district; the tops of the
+mountains rise above the waters and form fertile and cultivated islands.
+If the sea by any chance finds an outlet, then in proportion as it goes
+down, first the slopes, next the plains and valleys, appear and clothe
+themselves with productions of every kind. It is enough that the sea
+rises or falls by a foot, to inundate vast shores, or to restore them to
+cultivation and plenty.' There are not many illustrations at once so apt
+and so picturesque as this, but most of the hundred paragraphs that make
+up the Reflections are, notwithstanding one or two of the characteristic
+crotchets of Quesnai's school, both accurate and luminous.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+In May 1774 Lewis XV. died. His successor was only twenty years old; he
+was sluggish in mind, vacillating in temper, and inexperienced in
+affairs. Maurepas was recalled, to become the new king's chief adviser;
+and Maurepas, at the suggestion of one of Turgot's college friends,
+summoned the Intendant from Limoges, and placed him at the head of the
+department of marine. This post Turgot only held for a couple of months;
+he was then preferred to the great office of Controller-General. The
+condition of the national finance made its administration the most
+important of all the departments of the government. Turgot's policy in
+this high sphere belongs to the general history of France, and there is
+no occasion for us to reproduce its details here. It was mainly an
+attempt to extend over the whole realm the kind of reforms which had
+been tried on a small scale in the Limousin. He suppressed the
+_corvees_, and he tacked the money payment which was substituted for
+that burden on to the Twentieths, an impost from which the privileged
+class was not exempt. 'The weight of this charge,' he made the king say
+in the edict of suppression, 'now falls and must fall only on the
+poorest classes of our subjects.' This truth only added to the
+exasperation of the rich, and perhaps might well have been omitted.
+Along with the _corvees_ were suppressed the jurandes, or exclusive
+industrial corporations or trade-guilds, whose monopolies and
+restrictions were so mischievous an impediment to the wellbeing of the
+country. In the preamble to this edict we seem to be breathing the air,
+not of Versailles in 1775, but of the Convention in 1793:--'God, when he
+made man with wants, and rendered labour an indispensable resource, made
+the right of work the property of every individual in the world, and
+this property is the first, the most sacred, and the most
+imprescriptible of all kinds of property. We regard it as one of the
+first duties of our justice, and as one of the acts most of all worthy
+of our benevolence, to free our subjects from every infraction of that
+inalienable right of humanity.'
+
+Again, Turgot removed a tax from certain forms of lease, with a view to
+promote the substitution of a system of farming for the system of
+_metayers_. He abolished an obstructive privilege by which the Hotel
+Dieu had the exclusive right of selling meat during Lent. The whole of
+the old incoherent and vexatious police of the corn-markets was swept
+away. Finally, he inspired the publication of a short but most
+important writing, Boncerf's _Inconvenients des Droits Feodaux_, in
+which, without criticising the origin of the privileges of the nobles,
+the author showed how much it would be to the advantage of the lords to
+accept a commutation of their feudal dues. What was still more
+exasperating both to nobles and lawyers, was the author's hardy
+assertion that if the lords refused the offer of their vassals, the king
+had the power to settle the question for them by his own legislative
+authority. This was the most important and decisive of the
+pre-revolutionary tracts.
+
+Equally violent prejudices and more sensitive interests were touched by
+two other sets of proposals. The minister began to talk of a new
+territorial contribution, and a great survey and re-assessment of the
+land. Then followed an edict restoring in good earnest the free
+circulation of corn within the kingdom. Turgot was a partisan of free
+trade in its most entire application; but for the moment he contented
+himself with the free importation of grain and its free circulation at
+home, without sanctioning its exportation abroad. Apart from changes
+thus organically affecting the industry of the country, Turgot dealt
+sternly with certain corruptions that had crept into the system of
+tax-farming, as well as with the monstrous abuses of the system of
+court-pensions.
+
+The measures we have enumerated were all excellent in themselves, and
+the state of the kingdom was such as urgently to call for them. They
+were steps towards the construction of a fabric of freedom and justice.
+But they provoked a host of bitter and irreconcilable enemies, while
+they raised up no corresponding host of energetic supporters. The reason
+of the first of these circumstances is plain enough, but the second
+demands a moment's consideration. That the country clergy should
+denounce the Philosopher, as they called him, from the pulpit and the
+steps of the altar, was natural enough. Many even of his old colleagues
+of the Encyclopaedia had joined Necker against the minister. The greatest
+of them all, it is true, stood by Turgot with unfailing staunchness; a
+shower of odes, diatribes, dialogues, allegories, dissertations, came
+from the Patriarch of Ferney to confound and scatter the enemies of the
+new reforms. But the people were unmoved. If Turgot published an
+explanation of the high price of grain, they perversely took explanation
+for gratulation, and thought the Controller preferred to have bread
+dear. If he put down seditious risings with a strong hand, they insisted
+that he was in nefarious league with the corn-merchants and the bakers.
+How was it that the people did not recognise the hand of a benefactor?
+The answer is that they suspected the source of the new reforms too
+virulently to judge them calmly. For half a century, as Condorcet says
+pregnantly, they had been undergoing the evils of anarchy, while they
+supposed that they were feeling those of despotism. The error was grave,
+but it was natural, and one effect of it was to make every measure that
+proceeded from the court odious. Hence, when the parlements took up
+their judicial arms in defence of abuses and against reforms, the common
+people took sides with them, for no better reason than that this was to
+take sides against the king's government. Malesherbes in those days, and
+good writers since, held that the only safe plan was to convoke the
+States-General. They would at least have shared the responsibility with
+the crown. Turgot rejected this opinion. By doctrine, no less than by
+temperament, he disliked the control of a government by popular bodies.
+Everything for the people, nothing by the people: this was the maxim of
+the Economists, and Turgot held it in all its rigour. The royal
+authority was the only instrument that he could bring himself to use.
+Even if he could have counted on a Frederick or a Napoleon, the
+instrument would hardly have served his purposes; as things were, it was
+a broken reed, not a fine sword, that he had to his hand.
+
+The National Assembly and the Convention went to work exactly in the
+same stiff and absolute spirit as Turgot. They were just as little
+disposed to gradual, moderate, and compromising ways as he. But with
+them the absolute authority on which they leaned was real and most
+potent; with him it was a shadow. We owe it to Turgot that the
+experiment was complete: he proved that the monarchy of divine right was
+incapable of reform.[45] As it has been sententiously expressed, 'The
+part of the sages was now played out; room was now for the men of
+destiny.'
+
+[Footnote 45: Foncin's _Ministere de Turgot_, p. 574.]
+
+If the repudiation of a popular assembly was the cardinal error in
+Turgot's scheme of policy, there were other errors added. The
+publication of Boncerf's attack on the feudal dues, with the undisguised
+sanction of the minister, has been justly condemned as a grave
+imprudence, and as involving a forgetfulness of the true principles of
+government and administration, that would certainly not have been
+committed either by Colbert, in whom Turgot professed to seek his model,
+nor by Gournai, who had been his master. It was a broad promise of
+reforms which Turgot was by no means sure of being able to persuade the
+king and his council to adopt. By prematurely divulging his projects, it
+augmented the number of his adversaries, without being definite enough
+to bring new friends.[46] Again, Turgot did nothing to redeem it by
+personal conciliatoriness in carrying out the designs of a benevolent
+absolutism. The Count of Provence, afterwards Lewis XVIII., wrote a
+satire on the government during Turgot's ministry, and in it there is a
+picture of the great reformer as he appeared to his enemies: 'There was
+then in France an awkward, heavy, clumsy creature; born with more
+rudeness than character, more obstinacy than firmness, more impetuosity
+than tact; a charlatan in administration no less than in virtue, exactly
+formed to get the one decried and to disgust the world with the other;
+made harsh and distant by his self-love, and timid by his pride; as much
+a stranger to men, whom he had never known, as to the public weal, which
+he had never seen aright; this man was called Turgot.'
+
+[Footnote 46: See Mauguin's _Etudes Historiques sur l'Administration de
+l'Agriculture_, i. 353.]
+
+It is a mistake to take the word of political adversaries for a man's
+character, but adversaries sometimes only say out aloud what is already
+suspected by friends. The coarse account given by the Count of Provence
+shows us where Turgot's weakness as a ruler may have lain. He was
+distant and stiff in manner, and encouraged no one to approach him. Even
+his health went against him, for at a critical time in his short
+ministry he was confined to bed by gout for four months, and he could
+see nobody save clerks and secretaries. The very austerity, loftiness,
+and purity, which make him so reverend and inspiring a figure in the
+pages of the noble-hearted Condorcet, may well have been impediments in
+dealing with a society that, in the fatal words of the Roman historian,
+could bear neither its disorders nor their remedies.
+
+The king had once said pathetically: 'It is only M. Turgot and I who
+love the people.' But even with the king, there were points at which the
+minister's philosophic severity strained their concord. Turgot was the
+friend of Voltaire and Condorcet; he counted Christianity a form of
+superstition; and he, who as a youth had refused to go through life
+wearing the mask of the infidel abbe, had too much self-respect in his
+manhood to practise the rites and uses of a system which he considered
+a degradation of the understanding. One day the king said to Maurepas:
+'You have given me a Controller-general who never goes to mass.' 'Sire,'
+replied that ready worldling, 'the Abbe Terray always went'--and Terray
+had brought the government to bankruptcy. But Turgot hurt the king's
+conscience more directly than by staying away from mass and confession.
+Faithful to the long tradition of his ancestors, Lewis XVI. wished the
+ceremony of his coronation to take place at Rheims. Turgot urged that it
+should be performed at Paris, and as cheaply as possible. And he
+advanced on to still more delicate ground. In the rite of consecration,
+the usage was that the king should take an oath to pursue all heretics.
+Turgot demanded the suppression of this declaration of intolerance. It
+was pointed out to him that it was only a formality. But Turgot was one
+of those severe and scrupulous souls, to whom a wicked promise does not
+cease to be degrading by becoming hypocritical. And he was perfectly
+justified. It was only by the gradual extinction of the vestiges of her
+ancient barbarisms, as occasion offered, that the Church could have
+escaped the crash of the Revolution. Meanwhile, the king and the priests
+had their own way: the king was crowned at Rheims, and the priests
+exacted from him an oath to be unjust, oppressive, and cruel towards a
+portion of his subjects. Turgot could only remonstrate; but the
+philosophic memorial in which he protested in favour of religious
+freedom and equality, gave the king a serious shock.
+
+We have no space, nor would it be worth while, to describe the intrigues
+which ended in the minister's fall. Already in the previous volume, we
+have referred to the immediate and decisive share which, the queen had
+in his disgrace.[47] He was dismissed in the beginning of May 1776,
+having been in power little more than twenty months. 'You are too
+hurried,' Malesherbes had said to him. 'You think you have the love of
+the public good; not at all; you have a rage for it, for a man must be
+nothing short of enraged to insist on forcing the hand of the whole
+world.' Turgot replied, more pathetically perhaps than reasonably,
+'What, you accuse me of haste, and you know that in my family we die of
+gout at fifty!'
+
+[Footnote 47: See vol. i. p. 31.]
+
+There is something almost tragic in the joy with which Turgot's
+dismissal was received on all sides. 'I seem,' said Marmontel, 'to be
+looking at a band of brigands in the forest of Bondy, who have just
+heard that the provost-marshal has been discharged.' Voltaire and
+Condorcet were not more dismayed by the fall of the minister, than by
+the insensate delight which greeted the catastrophe. 'This event,' wrote
+Condorcet, 'has changed all nature in my eyes. I have no longer the same
+pleasure in looking at those fair landscapes over which he would have
+shed happiness and contentment. The sight of the gaiety of the people
+wrings my heart. They dance and sport, as if they had lost nothing. Ah,
+we have had a delicious dream, but it has been all too short.' Voltaire
+was equally inconsolable, and still more violent in the expression of
+his grief. When he had become somewhat calmer, he composed those
+admirable verses,--_To a Man_:
+
+
+    Philosophe indulgent, ministre citoyen,
+    Qui ne cherchas le vrai que pour faire le bien,
+    Qui d'un peuple leger et trop ingrat peut-etre
+    Preparais le bonheur et celui de son maitre,
+    Ce qu'on nomme disgrace a paye tes bienfaits.
+    Le vrai prix de travail n'est que de vivre en paix.
+
+
+Turgot at first showed some just and natural resentment at the levity
+with which he had been banished from power, and he put on no airs of
+theatrical philosophy. He would have been untrue to the sincerity of his
+character, if he had affected indifference or satisfaction at seeing his
+beneficent hopes for ever destroyed. But chagrin did not numb his
+industry or his wide interests. Condorcet went to visit him some months
+after his fall. He describes Turgot as reading Ariosto, as making
+experiments in physics, and as having forgotten all that had passed
+within the last two years, save when the sight of evils that he would
+have mitigated or removed, happened to remind him of it. He occupied
+himself busily with chemistry and optics, with astronomy and mechanics,
+and above all with meteorology, which was a new science in those days,
+and the value of which to the study of the conditions of human health,
+of the productions of the earth, of navigation, excited his most ardent
+anticipations. Turgot also was so moved by the necessity for a new
+synthesis of life and knowledge as to frame a plan for a great work 'on
+the human soul, the order of the universe, the Supreme Being, the
+principles of societies, the rights of men, political constitutions,
+legislation, administration, physical education, the means of perfecting
+the human race relatively to the progressive advance and employment of
+their forces, to the happiness of which they are susceptible, to the
+extent of the knowledge to which they may attain, to the certainty,
+clearness, and simplicity of the principles of conduct, to the purity of
+the feelings that spring up in men's souls.' While his mind was moving
+through these immense spaces of thought, he did not forget the things of
+the hour. He invented a machine for serving ship's cables. He wrote a
+plea for allowing Captain Cook's vessel to remain unmolested during the
+American war. With Adam Smith, with Dr. Price, with Franklin, with Hume,
+he kept up a grave and worthy correspondence. Of his own countrymen,
+Condorcet was his most faithful friend and disciple, and it is much to
+Condorcet's credit that this was so, for Turgot never gave way to the
+passionate impulses of the philosophic school against what Voltaire
+called the Infamous, that is to say, against the Church, her doctrines,
+her morality, her history.
+
+We have already said that the keyword to Turgot's political aims and
+social theory was not Pity nor Benevolence, but Justice. It was Justice
+also, not temporary Prejudice nor Passion, that guided his judgment
+through the heated issues of the time. This justice and exact
+reasonableness it was impossible to surprise or throw off its guard. His
+sublime intellectual probity never suffered itself to be tempted. He
+protested against the doctrines of Helvetius's book, _de l'Esprit_, and
+of D'Holbach's _Systeme de la Nature_, at a moment when some of his best
+friends were enthusiastic in admiration, for no better reason than that
+the doctrines of the two books were hateful to the ecclesiastics and
+destructive of the teaching of the Church. In the course of a
+discussion, Condorcet had maintained that in general scrupulous persons
+are not fit for great things: a Christian, he said, will waste in
+subduing the darts of the flesh time that he might have employed upon
+things that would have been useful to humanity; he will never venture to
+rise against tyrants, for fear of having formed a hasty judgment, and so
+forth in other cases. 'No virtue,' replies Turgot, 'in whatever sense
+you take the word, can dispense with justice; and I think no better of
+the people who do your _great things_ at the cost of justice, than I do
+of poets who fancy that they can produce great wonders of imagination
+without order and regularity. I know that excessive precision tends to
+deaden the fire alike of action and of composition; but there is a
+medium in everything. There has never been any question in our
+controversy of a capuchin wasting his time in quenching the darts of the
+flesh, though, by the way, in the whole sum of time wasted, the term
+expressing the time lost in satisfying the appetites of the flesh would
+probably be found to be decidedly the greater of the two.' This
+parenthesis is one of a hundred illustrations of Turgot's habitual
+refusal to be carried out of the narrow path of exact rationality, or to
+take for granted a single word of the common form of the dialect even of
+his best friends and closest associates. And the readiness with which
+men fall into common form, the levity with which they settle the most
+complex and difficult issues, stirred in Turgot what Michelet calls
+_ferocite_, and Mr. Matthew Arnold calls _soeva indignatio_. 'Turgot
+was filled with an astonished, awful, oppressive sense of the _immoral
+thoughtlessness_ of men; of the heedless, hazardous way in which they
+deal with things of the greatest moment to them; of the immense,
+incalculable misery which is due to this cause' (_M. Arnold_).
+
+Turgot died on the 20th of March 1781, leaving to posterity the memory
+of a character which was more perfect and imposing than his
+performances. Condorcet saw in this harmonious union and fine balance of
+qualities the secret of his unpopularity. 'Envy,' he says, 'seems more
+closely to attend a character that approaches perfection, than one that,
+while astonishing men by its greatness, yet by exhibiting a mixture of
+defects and vices, offers a consolation that envy seeks.'
+
+
+Transcribers' Notes:
+
+Minor printer errors (omitted or incorrect punctuation) have been
+amended without note. Minor inconsistencies in hyphenation have been
+resolved where possible, or retained where there was no way to determine
+which was correct, again without note. Other errors have been amended,
+and are listed below.
+
+OE/oe ligatures have not been retained in this version.
+
+
+List of Amendments:
+
+Page 50--superstitution amended to superstition--"... treated as
+superstition by those ..."
+
+Page 126--devolopment amended to development--"... lead gradually to the
+development of sound ..."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3), by John Morley
+
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