The articles on Agriculture, for example, are admirable alike for the fulness and precision with which they expose the actual state of France; for the clearness with which they trace its deplorable inadequateness back to the true sources; and for the strong interest and sympathy in the subject, which they both exhibit and inspire.  If now and again the touch is too idyllic, it was still a prodigious gain to let the country know in a definite way that of the fifty million arpents of cultivable land in the realm, more than one quarter lay either unbroken or abandoned.  And it was a prodigious gain to arouse the attention of the general public to the causes of the forced deterioration of French agriculture, namely, the restrictions on trade in grain, the arbitrariness of the imposts, and the flight of the population to the large towns.  Then the demonstration, corroborated in the pages of the Encyclopaedia by the two patriotic vaunts of contemporary English writers, of the stimulus given to agriculture by our system of free exports, contained one of the most useful lessons that the French had to learn.

Again, there are some abuses which cannot be more effectively attacked, than by a mere statement of the facts in the plainest and least argumentative terms.  The history of such an impost as the tax upon salt (Gabelle), and a bold outline of the random and incongruous fashions in which it was levied, were equivalent to a formal indictment.  It needed no rhetoric nor discussion to heighten the harsh injustice of the rule that “persons who have changed domicile are still taxed for a certain time in the seat of their former abode, namely, farmers and labourers for one year, and all other tax-payers for two years, provided the parish to which they have removed is within the same district; and if otherwise, then farmers to pay for two years, and other persons for three years” (Taille).  Thus a man under the given circumstances would have to pay double taxes for three years as a penalty for changing his dwelling.  We already hear the murmur of the cahiers of five-and-twenty years later in the account of the transports of joy with which the citizens of Lisieux saw the taille proportionelle established (1718), and how numerous other cities sent up prayers that the same blessing might be conferred on them.  “Reasons that it is not for us to divine, caused the rejection of these demands; so hard is it to do a good act, which everybody talks about, much more in order to seem to desire it, than from any intention of really doing it....  To illustrate the advantages of this plan, the impost of 1718 with all arrears for five years was discharged in twelve months without needless cost or dispute.  By an extravagance more proper than any other to degrade humanity, the common happiness made malcontents of all that class whose prosperity depends on the misery of others,”—­that is the privileged class.[161]