ple, point out, in dealing
with the questions of the tithes and of the seignorial dues in Artois,
that it is the unequal and irregular impact, above all, of those
impositions to which most of the evils flowing from them must be
imputed; the ill-feeling they engender between the farmer and his
landlord or his pastor, the bad blood they breed between the different
orders. If the charges of one sort and another upon one field of a
farmer's holding amounted, as was sometimes the case, to one-fifth of
the value of the crop, while upon other fields of his holding the
charges amounted to no more than one-thirtieth of the value of the crop,
the farmer not unnaturally gave his chief care to the fields which were
least heavily encumbered, without much troubling himself as to their
agricultural merits relatively to the other fields.

But while the authors of the _Avis_ earnestly desired to see all this
changed, and called for the most complete revision and re-organisation
of the agricultural system in Artois, they raised no philosophical
clamour against privileges as privileges, and they had sense enough to
see that no community could afford to bring about the abolition of the
most obnoxious 'privileges' at the cost of any flagrant violations of
the Rights of Property. 'Whatever may have been the origin of these
rights,' say the authors of the _Avis_, 'their antiquity has made them
property to be respected in the hands of those who possess it. To
deprive these owners of these rights would be an injustice and an act of
violence of which no citizen can possibly dream. The privileged orders
must be asked to divest themselves of their privileges.'

Here is a recognition of 'vested interests' for which we may look in
vain from the motley mob of the 'National Assembly' into which the
States-General of 1789 so rapidly resolved, or--to speak more
exactly--dissolved, themselves! With men of the Tiers-Etat, in a
province like Artois, who could see things so plainly and state them so
fairly before the convocation of the States-General, what became the
French Revolution, plunging the whole realm into anarchy, might surely
have been made a reasonable and orderly evolution of liberty. Such a
document goes a good way in support of the contention that with ordinary
firmness, consistency, and courage on the part of the luckless Louis
XVI., the convocation of the States-General in 1789, instead of leading
France, as it actually led her, through a