care, the patience, the interest, of a good ruler. Those impetuous
and peremptory spirits who see in Frederick or Napoleon the only born
rulers of men, might find in these letters, and in the acts to which
they refer, the memorials of a far more admirable and beneficent type.

* * * * *

The _corvee_, vexatious as it was, yet excited less violent heats and
inflicted less misery than the abuses of military service. There had
been a militia in the country as far back as the time of the
Merovingians, but the militia-service with which Turgot had to deal only
dated from 1726. Each parish was bound to supply its quota of men to
this service, and the obligation was perhaps the most odious grievance,
though not the most really mischievous, of all that then afflicted the
realm. The hatred which it raised was due to no failure of the military
spirit in the people. From Frederick the Great downwards, everybody was
well aware that the disasters to France which had begun with the
shameful defeat of Rossbach and ended with the loss of Canada in the
west and the Indies in the east (1757-1763), were due to no want of
valour in the common soldier. It was the generals, as Napoleon said
fifty years afterwards, who were incapable and inept. And it was the
ineptitude of the administrative chiefs that made the militia at once
ineffective and abhorred. First, they allowed a great number of
classified exemptions from the ballot. The noble, the tonsured clerk,
the counsellor, the domestic of noble, tonsured clerk, and counsellor,
the eldest son of the lawyer and the farmer, the tax collector, the
schoolmaster, were all exempt. Hence the curse of service was embittered
by a sense of injustice. This was one of the many springs in the old
regime that fed the swelling and vehement stream of passion for social
equality, until at length when the day came, it made such short and
furious work with the structure of envious partition between citizen and
citizen.

Again, by a curious perversity of official pedantry, the government
insisted on each man who drew the black ticket in the abhorred lottery,
performing his service in person. It forbade substitution. Under a
modern system of universal military service, this is perfectly
intelligible and just. But, as we have seen, military service was only
made obligatory on those who were already ground down by hardships. As a
consequence of this prohibition, those who were liable to b