total sum demanded from the Generality by the royal government was
greatly in excess of the local resources. The district was heavily
overcharged, relatively to other districts around it. No deduction had
been made from the sum exacted by the treasury, though the falling off
in prosperity was great and notorious. Turgot computed that 'the king's
share' was as large as that of the proprietors; in other words, taxation
absorbed one half of the net products of the land. The government
listened to these representations, and conceded to the Generality about
half of the remissions that Turgot had solicited. A greater operation
was the re-adjustment of the burden, thus lightened, within the
province. The people were so irritated by the disorders which had been
introduced by the imperfect operation of the proportional _taille_, that
with the characteristic impatience of a rude and unintelligent
population, they were heedlessly crying out for a return to the more
familiar, and therefore more comfortable, disorders of the arbitrary
_taille_. Turgot, as was natural, resisted this slovenly reaction, and
applied himself with zealous industry to the immense and complex work of
effecting a complete revision and settlement of the regulations for
assessment, and, what was a more gigantic enterprise, of carrying out a
new survey and new valuation of lands and property, to serve as a true
base for the application of an equitable assessment. At the end of
thirteen years of indomitable toil the work was still unfinished,
chiefly owing to want of money for its execution. The court wasted more
in a fortnight in the easy follies of Versailles, than would have given
to the Limousin the instrument of a finished scheme of fiscal order.
Turgot's labour was not wholly thrown away. The worst abuses were
corrected, and the most crying iniquities swept away, save that iniquity
of the exemption of the privileged orders, which Turgot could not yet
venture to touch.

Let us proceed to another of the master abuses of the old system. The
introduction of the _Corvee_, in the sense in which we have to speak of
it, dates no further back than the beginning of the eighteenth century.
It was an encroachment and an innovation on the part of the bureaucracy,
and the odd circumstance has been remarked that the first mention of the
road _corvees_ in any royal Act is the famous edict of 1776, which
suppressed them. Until the Regency this famous word had described on