much so that economists estimated that, through artificial restraints, one-quarter of the soil of France lay waste.  Turgot, in his edict on the grain trade, explained that kings in the past by ordinance, or the police without royal authority, had compiled a body “of legislation equivalent to a prohibition of bringing grain into Paris,” and this condition was universal.  One province might be starving and another oppressed with abundance.

Meanwhile, under the stimulant of applied science, centralization went on resistlessly, and the cost of administration is proportionate to centralization.  To bear the burden of a centralized government taxes must be equal and movement free, but here was a rapidly centralizing nation, the essence of whose organism was that taxes should be unequal and that movement should be restricted.

As the third quarter of the eighteenth century closed with the death of Louis XV, all intelligent French administrators recognized the dilemma; either relief must be given, or France must become insolvent, and revolution supervene upon insolvency.  But for the aristocracy revolution had no terrors, for they believed that they could crush revolution as their class had done for a thousand years.

Robert Turgot was born in 1727, of a respectable family.  His father educated him for the Church, but lack of faith caused him to prefer the magistracy, and on the death of his father he obtained a small place in the Court of Parliament.  Afterward he became a Master of Requests, and served for seven years in that judicial position, before he was made Intendant of the Province of Limousin.  Even thus early in life Turgot showed political sagacity.  In an address at the Sorbonne he supported the thesis that “well-timed reform alone averts revolution.”  Distinguishing himself as Intendant, on the death of Louis XV the King called Turgot to the Council of State, and in August, 1774, Turgot became Minister of Finance.  He came in pledged to reform, and by January, 1776, he had formulated his plan.  In that month he presented to the King his memorable Six Edicts, the first of which was the most celebrated state paper he ever wrote.  It was the Edict for the Suppression of the Corvee.  The corvee threw the burden of maintaining the highways on the peasantry by exacting forced labor.  It was admittedly the most hateful, the most burdensome, and the most wasteful of all the bad taxes of the time, and Turgot, following the precedent of the Roman Empire, advised instead a general highway impost.  The proposed impost in itself was not considerable, and would not have been extraordinarily obnoxious to the privileged classes, but for the principle of equality by which Turgot justified it:  “The expenses of government having for their object the interests of all, all should contribute to them; and the more advantages a man has, the more that man should contribute.”