e also the proprietors of the land on
which they were exacted. Now the nobility were entirely stripped of
power and in many instances of land as well. How empty and bottomless
the oppressive institutions and how burdensome the taxes which rested
on nothing but a paper grant, musty with age and backed only by royal
complaisance! Want too was always looking in at the doors of the many,
while the few were enjoying the national substance. This year there
was a crisis, for before the previous harvest time devastating
hail-storms had swept the fields, in 1788; during the winter there had
been pinching want and many had perished from destitution and cold;
the advancing seasons had brought warmth, but sufficient time had not
even yet elapsed for fields and herds to bring forth their increase,
and by the myriad firesides of the people hunger was still an
unwelcome guest.

With wholesome economy such crises may be surmounted in a rich and
fertile country. But economy had not been practised for fifty years by
the governing classes. As early as 1739 there had been a deficiency
in the French finances. From small beginnings the annual loans had
grown until, in 1787, the sum to be raised over and above the regular
income was no less than thirty-two millions of dollars. This was all
due to the extravagance of the court and the aristocracy, who spent,
for the most part, far more than the amount they actually collected
and which they honestly believed to be their income. Such a course was
vastly more disastrous than it appeared, being ruinous not only to
personal but to national well-being, inasmuch as what the nobles, even
the earnest and honest ones, believed to be their legitimate income
was not really such. Two thirds of the land was in their hands; the
other third paid the entire land-tax. They were therefore regarding as
their own two thirds of what was in reality taken altogether from the
pockets of the small proprietors. Small sacrifices the ruling class
professed itself ready to make, but such a one as to pay their share
of the land-tax--never. It had been proposed also to destroy the
monopoly of the grain trade, and to abolish the road-work, a task more
hateful to the people than any tax, because it brought them into
direct contact with the exasperating superciliousness of petty
officials. But in all these proposed reforms, Necker, Calonne, and
Lomenie de Brienne, each approaching the nobles from a separate
standpoint, had ali