It is no innate factiousness, as flighty critics of French affairs sometimes imply, that has made civil equality the passion of modern France.  The root of this passion is an undying memory of the curse that was inflicted on its citizens, morally and materially, by the fiscal inequalities of the old regime.  The article, Privilege, urges the desirableness of inquiring into the grounds of the vast multitude of fiscal exemptions, and of abolishing all that were no longer associated with the performance of real and useful service.  “A bourgeois,” says the writer, anticipating a cry that was so soon to ring through the land, “a bourgeois in comfortable circumstances, and who could himself pay half of the taille of a whole parish, if it were imposed in its due proportion,—­on payment of the amount of his taxes for one or for two years, and often for less; without birth, education, or talents, buys a place in a local salt office, or some useless charge at court, or in the household of some prince....  This man proceeds to enjoy in the public eye all the exemptions possessed by the nobility and the high magistracy....  From such an abuse of privileges spring two very considerable evils:  the poorer part of the citizens are always burdened beyond their strength, though they are the most useful to the State, since this class is composed of those who cultivate the land, and procure a subsistence for the upper classes; the other evil is that privileges disgust persons of education and talent with the idea of entering the magistracy or other professions demanding labour and application, and lead them to prefer small posts and paltry offices.”  And so forth, with a gravity and moderation, that were then common in political discussion in France.  It gradually disappeared in 1789, when it was found that the privileged orders, even at that time, in their cahiers steadily demanded the maintenance of every one of their most odious and iniquitous rights.[162]

When it is said, then, that the Encyclopaedists deliberately prepared the way for a political revolution, let us remember that what they really did was to shed the light of rational discussion on such practical grievances as even the most fatuous conservative in France does not now dream of bringing back.

Let us turn to two other of the most oppressive institutions that then scourged France.  First the Corvee, or feudal rule which forced every unprivileged farmer and peasant in France to furnish so many days’ labour for the maintenance of the highways.  Arthur Young tells us, and the statement is confirmed by the Minutes of Turgot, that this wasteful, cruel, and inefficient system was annually the ruin of many hundreds of persons, and he mentions that no less than three hundred farmers were reduced to beggary in filling up a single vale in Lorraine.[163] Under this all-important head, the Encyclopaedia has an article that does not merely add to the knowledge of its readers