long with others of your subjects as wearied as
ourselves. . . . We would entreat yet more but you cannot do all at one
time."

Imposts and privileges, in the really popular registers, are the two
enemies against which complaints everywhere arise[5276].

"We are overwhelmed by demands for subsidies,. . . we are burdened with
taxes beyond our strength,. . . we do not feel able to support any more,
we perish, overpowered by the sacrifices demanded of us. Labor is taxed
while indolence is exempt. . . . Feudalism is the most disastrous of
abuses, the evils it causes surpassing those of hail and lightning. . . .
Subsistence is impossible if three-quarters of the crops are to be
taken for field-rents, terrage, etc. . . . The proprietor has a fourth
part, the decimateur a twelfth, the harvester a twelfth, taxation a
tenth, not counting the depredations of vast quantities of game which
devour the growing crops: nothing is left for the poor cultivator but
pain and sorrow."

Why should the Third-Estate alone pay for roads on which the nobles and
the clergy drive in their carriages? Why are the poor alone subject to
militia draft? Why does "the subdelegate cause only the defenseless and
the unprotected to be drafted?" Why does it suffice to be the servant
of a privileged person to escape this service? Destroy those dove-cotes,
formerly only small pigeon-pens and which now contain as many as 5,000
pairs. Abolish the barbarous rights of "motte, quevaise and domaine
congeable[5277] under which more than 500,000 persons still suffer
in Lower Brittany." "You have in your armies, Sire, more than 30,000
Franche-Comte serfs;" should one of these become an officer and be
pensioned out of the service he would be obliged to return to and live
in the hut in which he was born, otherwise; at his death, the seignior
will take his pittance. Let there be no more absentee prelates, nor
abbes-commendatory. "The present deficit is not to be paid by us but
by the bishops and beneficiaries; deprive the princes of the church of
two-thirds of their revenues." "Let feudalism be abolished. Man, the
peasant especially, is tyrannically bowed down to the impoverished
ground on which he lies exhausted. . . . There is no freedom, no
prosperity, no happiness where the soil is enthralled. . . . Let the
lord's dues, and other odious taxes not feudal, be abolished, a thousand
times returned to the privileged. Let feudalism content itself with
its iron scepter wi