was the 'taille,' a tax upon the estimated property of individuals. In secret session the Council fixed its amount each year, together with its apportionment among the several provinces upon the recommendation of the Intendants and their Sub-delegates. The mode of collection was atrocious. In each parish one of the inhabitants was selected by the Sub-delegate not only to collect the tax but to assess it upon his neighbours according to his opinion of their means. The duty was compulsory, and failure to collect the amount contributable by the parish was punished with the galleys. The wretched collector had often to be protected by a strong body of police from being torn to pieces, and was generally ruined; and he revenged himself by ruining in turn, by excessive exactions, those against whom he had a grudge, and exempting his own relatives or those who might be useful to him on the expiry of his odious task.

The Council had also the control of all public works and all the great highways. The Intendant directed the work of the engineers; the Sub-delegate provided the corvée or forced labour which executed it. The corvée also included the transportation of troops from one part of the country to another, for which the peasant was forced not only to supply his labour but furnish his horses and carts.

The Council also interfered in the course of justice. In all cases where individuals brought actions against the authorities, it either ordered the Courts to dismiss them or reversed the decisions if against the State. De Tocqueville says: There was hardly any part of social economy or political organization which was not remodelled by decrees ' of the Council during the forty years which preceded the 'Revolution.' Even the relief of the poor in the most remote corners of France was entirely regulated by the central body in Paris, which annually assigned to each province, out of the general taxes, certain funds which the Intendant distributed in relief among the various parishes. The Council issued annual decrees for the establishment of workshops for the indigent in places which it selected. It also undertook to teach the peasantry how to cultivate the land, and in case of need compelled them to adopt its advice. It distributed, through the Intendants and Sub-delegates, pamphlets upon the art of agriculture, though hardly any of the peasantry

could read or write. As De Tocqueville remarks: 'It would 'have been more effectual to have diminished the burdens and 'inequalities which oppressed agriculture, but that does not seem to have entered into their heads.'

Under this system the free self-governing townships of the Middle Ages gradually lost their independence, and were placed under the rule of officials sent down from Paris. In this connexion one of the worst abuses of the old regime falls to be mentioned. In order to replenish the royal exchequer it was the practice to allow townships which had had their rights of self-government abolished to repurchase those rights from the central authority at a very heavy price. When the central cash-box was again empty, the privileges of self-government were again abolished, to be resold later on. De Tocqueville says that 'in the course of eighty years 'the right to elect their magistrates was sold as much as seven times over to the towns.' The reason for this shameful plunder was openly avowed. 'The necessities of our 'finances,' runs an edict of 1722, 'oblige us to seek the means ' of replenishing them,' and De Tocqueville adds: 'I know ' of nothing more disgraceful in the character of the old regime.' No hamlet, however insignificant, was allowed to expend without permission any sum, however small, on local requirements. Before a town could spend its own money it had to petition the Sub-delegate, who reported to the Intendant, who referred the request to the Controller General, who laid it before the Council--a sort of House-that-Jack-built procedure, which involved a minimum delay of a year, often extended to three years, before an answer was returned. This was inevitable, seeing that such petitions were continually pouring in by the thousand from all parts of France. An idea of the subordination to which the localities were reduced by the bureaucracy may be obtained from the style adopted in addressing officials. 'We beg of you most humbly, Monseigneur,' write some of them to the Intendant, 'to accord us your goodwill and protection. We will endeavour to render ourselves not unworthy by our submission to all 'the commands of your Grandeur. We have never opposed 'your wishes, Monseigneur.' 'It was thus,' adds De Tocqueville, that the bourgeoisie were prepared for Government, ' and the people for Liberty!'

There was, in fact, no affair of business in which the State did not interfere. Even the agricultural population, which is as a rule so hostile to advice, were brought to believe, under this demoralizing system, that if their calling was not in a satisfactory condition, the fault lay with the Government. One of them writes to an Intendant: 'Why does not the 'Government appoint Inspectors who would go once a year 'through the provinces to ascertain the state of cultivation, ' and teach the cultivators to change it for the better; telling 'them how to rear their cattle and fatten them; how to sell 'them and where they should take them to market? The Inspectors should be well paid and the cultivators giving 'best proof of their success should receive marks of honour.' Inspectors and crosses!' is the bitter comment of De Tocqueville, this is an expedient which would never have ' occurred to a Suffolk farmer.'

The Government having thus usurped the place of Providence, it was natural that each individual should invoke it in his own necessities. Peasants demanded compensation for the loss of their beasts; landowners in good circumstances implored assistance to increase the value of their land; manufacturers solicited the Intendant to grant them privileges which would guarantee them against inconvenient competition; or, having fallen into difficulties, asked him to procure for them a loan from the Controller General. In times of dearth, so frequent in the eighteenth century, all hopes were centred in the Intendant, and it was from him alone that nutrition seemed to be expected. Every misfortune was attributed to the Government; it was even held responsible for the inclemency of the It is not to be wondered at that when Arthur Young was travelling through France, the greatest marvel in the eyes of his French friends was the fact that he, a private country gentleman, should have undertaken his tour of inquiry entirely at his own expense, and without any mission from the British Government.

Reference was made above to the policy of Richelieu in respect of the destruction of the political power of the nobility. Deprived of all share in the local life of the country, as well as all participation in national affairs, they ceased to live on their estates, except those who were too poor and insignificant to attend the Court. The great proprietors became place

and pension hunters about the person of the King, and the penalty they most dreaded was to be exiled to their country palaces. Their tenants seldom knew them by sight, but continually felt their presence by the seignorial dues exacted. In the Middle Ages the great nobles maintained order, dispensed justice, relieved distress, and in many directions exercised useful functions. Under Louis XIV. and his successors they were supplanted by the bureaucracy, and all that the peasantry knew about them was that the cultivator of the soil had to grind his wheat at the seignorial mill, sell it at the seignorial market, press his grapes in the seignorial winepress, bake his bread in the seignorial oven, paying a heavy fee on each occasion. Moreover, he often had to see his crops devoured by the seignorial game, one of the bitterest grievances of all. Besides the 'capitaineries,' or royal hunting demesnes, which were of enormous extent, the great nobles kept out of cultivation vast tracts for game preserves, thus not only restricting the cultivable area of the country, but diminishing the food supply by the devastations of the deer and birds. Arthur Young, who was a well-to-do Suffolk squire, and therefore the last person in the world to be imbued with revolutionary opinions, records his feelings when he rode through thirty-seven miles of country in one of the best parts of France for markets, and found the quantity of waste lands surprising; it was the predominant feature the whole way. Thus it 'is,' he says,' wherever you stumble on a Grand Seigneur you are sure to find his property desert. Go to their residences, 'wherever they may be, and you would probably find them ' in the midst of a forest, very well peopled with deer, wild 'boars, and wolves. Oh! if I was the legislator of France ' for a day I would make such great lords skip again.' Game preserving involved a further wrong to the farmers, for they were not permitted to weed and clear and sow their land until far too late in the year lest the young birds should be disturbed, the consequence being that the crops were so scanty as to strike with horror the practised eye of Arthur Young, accustomed as he was to the luxuriance of Suffolk farms.

In spite of their immunity from taxation the French noblesse became impoverished generation by generation, for they wasted the rents and dues wrung from their estates in gambling and debauchery in Paris. Bit by bit parts of

their properties were sold to the thrifty and penurious peasantry, so that at the time of the Revolution a good deal of the land was cultivated by small holders. Curiously enough this very fact contributed to increase the hatred felt towards the noblesse and precipitated the Revolution, for the exactions which had been borne with patience while there was no hope of emancipation from slavery, became absolutely intolerable after the sweets of proprietorship had been tasted. As Richelieu had foreseen, they became discontented with their position, and began to inquire why they alone should pay taxes to the State, while greater proprietors not only paid none but wrung enormous tribute from little ones.

In addition, the nobility themselves contributed to their own downfall by the adoption of the new philosophy of the Encyclopædists. Revolutionary ideas became fashionable in Paris, which had become to all intents and purposes France, owing to the extreme centralization above described. The language of Voltaire, Diderot, d'Holbach, and d'Alembert spread through the whole country. It was not necessary for the illiterate masses to have read a single line of those authors; their ideas passed from mouth to mouth, and were, so to speak, in the very air. Then appeared Rousseau's 'Contrat Social,' a work which had the most extraordinary effect upon the thought of the period; greater perhaps than that produced by any other book ever published. In it was enunciated the supremacy of the State in its most extreme form. The sovereignty of the people was proclaimed as the only title of authority, the word 'people' signifying the proletariat, to the exclusion of all the wealth and intellect of a nation; thus substituting for the despotism of a single tyrant the far worse despotism of the ignorant, envious mob, a prototype of present-day Bolshevism.

The frightful state of the French finances which was one of the contributory causes of the Revolution, was largely due to the incredible prodigality of the Court, of which the following examples, culled from Taine's ' Origines de la France 'Contemporaine,' will give some idea.

The King's own establishment, as it existed in the reign of Louis XVI., consisted of a body-guard, infantry, cavalry, and corps d'élite, numbering in all 9,000 men, costing annually 7,681,000 livres, and the whole decked out in gorgeous and