Generality, and he committed the
execution of the approved plans to contractors on exact and
business-like principles. The result of this change was not merely an
immense relief to the unfortunate men who had been every year harassed
to death and half-ruined by the old method of forced labour, but so
remarkable an improvement both in the goodness and extension of the
roads, that when Arthur Young went over them five and twenty years
afterwards, he pronounced them by far the noblest public ways to be
found anywhere in France.

Two very instructive facts may be mentioned in connection with the
suppression of the _corvees_ in the Limousin. The first is that the
central government assented to the changes proposed by the young
Intendant, as promptly as if it had been a committee of the Convention,
instead of being the nominee of an absolute king. The other is that the
people in the country, when Turgot had his plans laid before them in
their parish meetings held after mass on Sundays, listened with the
keenest distrust and suspicion to what they insisted on regarding as a
sinister design for exacting more money from them. Well might Condorcet
say that very often it needs little courage to do men harm, for they
constantly suffer harm tranquilly enough; but when you take it into your
head to do them some service, then they revolt and accuse you of being
an innovator. It is fair, however, to remember how many good grounds the
French countryman had for distrusting the professions of any agent of
the government. For even in the case of this very reform, though Turgot
was able to make an addition to the _taille_ in commutation of the work
on the roads, he was not able to force a contribution, either to the
_taille_ or any other impost, from the privileged classes, the very
persons who were best able to pay. This is only an illustration of what
is now a well-known fact, that revolution was made necessary less by
despotism than by privilege on the one side, and by intense political
distrust on the other side.

Turgot was thoroughly awake to the necessity of penetrating public
opinion. The first principle of the school of Economists was an
'enlightened people.' Nothing was to be done by them; everything was to
be done for them. But they were to be trained to understand the grounds
of the measures which a central authority conceived, shaped, and carried
into practice. Rousseau was the only writer of the revolutionary school
who had