their own peasants. It was a claim
less of humanity than of bare justice, that the landowners should do
something for men with whom their relations had been so close as to be
almost domestic, and to whose hard toil their masters owed all that they
possessed. As a mere matter of self-interest, moreover, apart alike from
both justice and humanity, the death or flight of the labourers would
leave the proprietors helpless when the next good season came, and for
want of hands the land would be doomed to barrenness for years to come,
to the grievous detriment no less of the landowners than of the whole
people of the realm. Accordingly, Turgot ordered all those who had
dismissed their _metayers_ to take them back again, and he enacted
generally that all proprietors, of whatever quality or condition, and
whether privileged or not, should be bound to keep and support until the
next harvest all the labourers who had been on their land in the
previous October, as well women and children as men.

Turgot's policy in this matter is more instructive as to the social
state of France, than it may at first sight appear. At first sight we
are astonished to find the austere economist travelling so far from the
orthodox path of free contract as to order a landowner to furnish at his
own cost subsistence for his impoverished tenants. But the truth is that
the _metayer_ was not a free tenant in the sense which we attach to the
word. '_In Limousin_,' says Arthur Young, '_the metayers are considered
as little better than menial servants_.' And it is not going beyond the
evidence to say that they were even something lower than menial
servants; they were really a kind of serf-caste. They lived in the
lowest misery. More than half of them were computed to be deeply in debt
to the proprietors. In many cases they were even reduced every year to
borrow from their landlord, before the harvest came round, such coarse
bread of mixed rye and barley as he might choose to lend them. What
Turgot therefore had in his mind was no relation of free contract,
though it was that legally, but a relation which partly resembled that
of a feudal lord to his retainer, and partly--as Sir Henry Maine has
hinted--that of a planter to his negroes. It is less surprising, then,
that Turgot should have enforced some of the responsibilities of the
lord and the planter.

The nobles had resort to a still more indefensible measure than the
expulsion of their _metayers_. Most o