at
900,000 livres, but that the Intendant working out the details of the
abolition of the system, with the help of a number of the local
landholders (commonly supposed to have been the tyrants who profited by
the abuse), had reduced this estimate to 300,000 livres, at which sum
the tax had been converted into a money payment for the maintenance of
the roads, the province being thus relieved of two-thirds of the burden
borne by it. It is instructive to learn that attempts to bring about
similar results elsewhere in France were resented and resisted, not by
the great landholders, but by the corveable peasants themselves! What
they really wanted, it would seem, was not so much to be relieved of the
obligation of forced labour by a payment of money, as to have their
roads made for them at the expense of the State, under the impression,
ineradicable down to our own day, and elsewhere than in France, that
what everybody pays nobody pays, an impression which is the trusty
shield and weapon at once of the Socialists and of the Protectionists
all over the world.

Public education in Picardy, as well as elsewhere in France, long
antedates the Revolution of 1789. Three centuries ago Olivier de Serre
and Bernard Palissy lamented the foolish disposition of French peasants
in the Limousin and in Picardy to give their elder sons a better
education than they had themselves received. 'The poor man will spend a
great part of what he has earned in the sweat of his brow, to make his
son a gentleman; and at last this same gentleman will be ashamed to be
found in company with his father, and will be displeased to be called
the son of a labouring man. And if by chance the good man has other
children, this gentleman it will be who will devour the others and have
the best of everything; he never concerns himself to think how much he
cost at school while his brothers were working at home with their
father.' This reads like a complaint of the nineteenth century in
democratic America, but it is, in fact, a complaint of the sixteenth
century in feudal France. It must have been frequent enough in this part
of Picardy, now the Department of the Somme. For from a very early time
this region has been full of small farmers bent on bettering their own
condition or that of their sons. In the public library of Abbeville
there is a land register drawn up in 1312 for the service of the
officers of King Edward II. of England, who had married Isabel of
Franc