or ecclesiastical circumscription; second, the
province or military government; and third, the Generality, or a
district defined for fiscal and administrative purposes. The Intendant
in the government of the last century was very much what the Prefect is
in the government of our own time. Perhaps, however, we understand
Turgot's position in Limousin best, by comparing it to that of the Chief
Commissioner of some great district in our Indian Empire. For example,
the first task which Turgot had to perform was to execute a new
land-assessment for purposes of imperial revenue. He had to construct
roads, to build barracks, to administer justice, to deal with a famine,
just as the English civilian has to do in Orissa or Behar. Much of his
time was taken up in elaborate memorials to the central government, and
the desk of the controller-general at Versailles was loaded with minutes
and reports exactly like the voluminous papers which fill the mahogany
boxes of the Members of Council and the Home Secretary at Calcutta. The
fundamental conditions of the two systems of government were much alike;
absolute political authority, and an elaborately centralised civil
administration for keeping order and raising a revenue. The direct
authority of an Intendant was not considerable. His chief functions were
the settlement of detail in executing the general orders that he
received from the minister; a provisional decision on certain kinds of
minor affairs; and a power of judging some civil suits, subject to
appeal to the Council. But though the Intendant was so strictly a
subordinate, yet he was the man of the government, and thoroughly in its
confidence. The government only saw with his eyes, and only acted on the
faith of his reports, memorials, and requisitions; and this in a country
where the government united in itself all forms of power, and was
obliged to be incessantly active and to make itself felt at every point.

Of all the thirty-two great districts in which the authority of the
Intendant stood between the common people and the authority of the
minister at Versailles, the Generality of Limoges was the poorest, the
rudest, the most backward, and the most miserable. To the eye of the
traveller with a mind for the picturesque, there were parts of this
central region of France whose smiling undulations, delicious
water-scenes, deep glens extending into amphitheatres, and slopes hung
with woods of chestnut, all seemed to make a love