TOULOUSE, 4th November 1764.[149]

Smith and his two pupils made their proposed expedition to Montpellier during the sittings of the States, for we find them visited there by Horne Tooke,[150] then still parson of Brentford, who had been on a tour in Italy, and stayed some time in Montpellier on his way back.  Tooke, it may be said here, was no admirer of Smith; he thought the Theory of Moral Sentiments nonsense, and the Wealth of Nations written for a wicked purpose,[151] and this is the only occasion on which they are known to have met.

The little provincial assembly which Smith had come to Montpellier to see was at that period, it ought to be mentioned, attracting much attention from all the thinkers and reformers of France, and was thought by many of the first of them to furnish the solution of the political question of that age.  The States of Languedoc were almost the only remains of free institutions then left in France.  In all the thirty-two provinces of the country except six the States had been suppressed altogether, and in five of these six they were too small to be important or vigorous; but Languedoc was a great province, containing twenty-three bishoprics and more territory than the kingdom of Belgium, and the States governed its affairs so well that its prosperity was the envy of the rest of France.  They dug canals, opened harbours, drained marshes, made roads, which Arthur Young singles out for praise, and made them without the corvee under which the rest of rural France was groaning.  They farmed the imperial taxes of the province themselves, to avoid the exactions of the farmers-general.  They allowed the noblesse none of the exemptions so unfairly enjoyed by them elsewhere.  The taille, which was a personal tax in other parts of the kingdom, was in Languedoc an equitable land tax, assessed according to a valuation periodically revised.  There was not a poorhouse in the whole province, and such was its prosperity and excellent administration that it enjoyed better credit in the market than the Central Government, and the king used sometimes, in order to get more favourable terms, to borrow on the security of the States of Languedoc instead of his own.[152]

Under those circumstances it is not surprising that one of the favourite remedies for the political situation in France was the revival of the provincial assemblies and the suppression of the intendants—­“Grattan’s Parliament and the abolition of the Castle.”  Turgot, among others, favoured this solution, though he was an intendant himself.  Necker had just put it into execution when the Revolution came and swept everything away.  Smith himself has expressed the strongest opinion in favour of the administration of provincial affairs by a local body instead of by an intendant, and he must have witnessed with no ordinary interest the proceedings of this remarkable little assembly at Montpellier, with its 23 prelates on the