r genuine efforts and their generous hopes.

M. Turgot set to work at once. Whilst governing his district of Limoges,
he had matured numerous plans and shaped extensive theories. He belonged
to his times and to the school of the philosophers as regarded his
contempt for tradition and history; it was to natural rights alone, to
the innate and primitive requirements of mankind, that he traced back his
principles and referred as the basis for all his attempts. "The rights
of associated men are not founded upon their history but upon their
nature," says the _Memoire au Roi sur les Municipalites,_ drawn up under
the eye of Turgot. By this time he desired no more to reform old France;
he wanted a new France. "Before ten years are over," he would say, "the
nation will not be recognizable, thanks to enlightenment. This chaos
will have assumed a distinct form. Your Majesty will have quite a new
people, and the first of peoples." A profound error, which was that of
the whole Revolution, and the consequences of which would have been
immediately fatal; if the powerful instinct of conservatism and of
natural respect for the past had not maintained between the regimen which
was crumbling away and the new fabric connections more powerful and more
numerous than their friends as well as their enemies were aware of.

Two fundamental principles regulated the financial system of M. Turgot,
economy in expenditure and freedom in trade; everywhere he ferreted out
abuses, abolishing useless offices and payments, exacting from the entire
administration that strict probity of which he set the example. Louis
XVI. supported him conscientiously at that time in all his reforms; the
public made fun of it. "The king," it was said, "when he considers
himself an abuse, will be one no longer." At the same time, a decree of
September 13, 1774, re-established at home that freedom of trade in grain
which had been suspended by Abbe Terray, and the edict of April, 1776,
founded freedom of trade in wine. "It is by trade alone, and by free
trade, that the inequality of harvests can be corrected," said the
minister in the preamble of his decree. "I have just read M. Turgot's
masterpiece," wrote Voltaire to D'Alembert "it seems to reveal to us new
heavens and a new earth." It was on account of his financial innovations
that the comptroller-general particularly dreaded the return of the old
Parliament, with which he saw himself threatened every day.