ly
the services owed by dependents to their lords. It meant so many days'
labour on the lord's lands, and so many offices of domestic duty. When,
in the early part of the century, the advantages of a good system of
high-roads began to be perceived by the government, the convenient idea
came into the heads of the more ingenious among the Intendants of
imposing, for the construction of the roads, a royal or public _corvee_
analogous to that of private feudalism. Few more mischievous imposts
could have been devised.

That undying class who are contented with the shallow presumptions of _a
priori_ reasoning in economic matters, did, it is true, find specious
pleas even for the road _corvee_. There has never been an abuse in the
history of the world, for which something good could not be said. If men
earned money by labour and the use of their time, why not require from
them time and labour instead of money? By the latter device, are we not
assured against malversation of the funds? Those who substitute words
for things, and verbal plausibilities for the observation of experience,
could prolong these arguments indefinitely. The evils of the road
_corvee_, meanwhile remained patent and indisputable. In England at the
same period, it is true, the country people were obliged to give six
days in the year to the repair of the highways, under the management of
the justices of the peace. And in England the business was performed
without oppression. But then this only illustrates the unwisdom of
arguing about economic arrangements in the abstract. All depends on the
conditions by which the given arrangement is surrounded, and a practice
that in England was merely clumsy, was in France not only clumsy but a
gross cruelty. There the burden united almost all the follies and
iniquities with which a public service could be loaded. The French
peasant had to give, not six, but twelve or fifteen days of labour every
year for the construction and repair of the roads of his neighbourhood.
If he had a horse and cart, they too were pressed into the service. He
could not choose the time, and he was constantly carried away at the
moment when his own poor harvest needed his right arm and his
supervision. He received no pay, and his days on the roads were days of
hunger to himself and his family. He had the bitterness of knowing that
the advantage of the high-road was slight, indirect, and sometimes null
to himself, while it was direct and great to