CHAP. rectitude, and clearness. He had not the rapid intuiVII. tions of genius, but his character was firm, his mode 1774 of thinking liberal, and he loved to surround himself

July.

with able men. His conversation was reserved; his manner grave and coldly polite. As he served a weak king, he was always on his guard, and to give a categorical answer was his aversion. Like nearly every Frenchman, he was thoroughly a monarchist; and he also loved Louis the Sixteenth, whose good opinion he gained at once and ever retained. Eleven years before, he had predicted that the conquest of Canada would hasten the independence of British America, and he was now from vantage ground to watch his prophecy come true.

The philosophers of the day, like the king, wished the happiness of the people, and public opinion required that they should be represented in the cabinet. Maurepas complied, and in July, 1774, the place of minister of the marine was conferred on Turgot, whose name was as yet little known at Paris, and whose artlessness made him even less dangerous as a rival than Vergennes. "I am told he never goes to mass," said the king, doubtingly, and yet consented to the appointment. In five weeks, Turgot so won upon his sovereign's good will, that he was transferred to the ministry of finance. This was the wish of all the philosophers; of D'Alembert, Condorcet, Bailly, La Harpe, Marmontel, Thomas, Condillac, Morellet, and Voltaire. Nor of them alone. "Turgot," said Malesherbes, "has the heart of L'Hôpital, and the head of Bacon." His purity, moreover, gave him clearsightedness and distinctness of purpose. At a moment when everybody confessed that reform

VII.

July.

was essential, it seemed a national benediction that CHAP a youthful king should intrust the task of amendment to a statesman, who preserved his purity of 1774. nature in a libertine age, and joined unquestioned probity to comprehensive intelligence and administrative experience.

The annual public expenses largely exceeded the revenue, and extortions to meet the deficit fell on the humble and the weak. Yet the chief financial officers grew enormously rich, and were adepts in refined luxury, masking their revels by an affectation of philosophy. "We are well off," they would say; "of what use is reform?" The land tax, the poll tax, the best tithes of the produce for the priest, twentieths, military service, taxes on consumption, labor on the highways, crushed the peasantry. The indirect taxes were farmed out to commissioners, who had power to enforce extortionate demands by summarily sending the demurrers to the galleys or the scaffold.

The protective system superintended the use of capital. The right to labor was a privilege sold for the benefit of the finances, and labor itself was so bound in the meshes of innumerable rules, that manufactures grew up timidly under the dangerous favor of arbitrary encouragement. The progress of agriculture was still hindered by the servitudes of the soil. Each little farm was in bondage under a complicated system of irredeemable dues, to roads and canals; to the bakehouse and the brewery of the lord of the manor; to his winepress and his mill; to his tolls at the river, the market, or the fair; to ground rents, and quit rents, and fines on alienation.

July.

CHAP. The game laws let in the wild beasts and birds to VII. fatten on the growth of the poor man's fields; and 1774 after his harvest provincial custom-houses blocked domestic commerce; the export of corn, and even its free circulation within the realm, was prohibited; so that one province might waste from famine, and another want a market for its superfluous production.

Out of this sad state Turgot undertook to lift his country. "It is to you personally," said he to Louis the Sixteenth, "to the man, honest, just, and good, rather than to the king, that I give myself up. You have confided to me the happiness of your people, and the care of making you and your authority beloved; but I shall have to combat those who gain by abuses, the prejudices against all reform, the majority of the court, and every solicitor of favors. I shall sacrifice myself for the people; but I may incur even their hatred by the very measures I shall take to prevent their distress." "Have no fear," said the king, pressing the hand of his new comptrollergeneral; "I shall always support you."

The exigencies of his position made Turgot a partisan of the central unity of power; he was no friend to revolutions; he would have confined the parliaments of France to their simple office as judges; he had no predilection for states general, or a system like that of England. To unobstructed power, enlightened by advice, he looked for good laws, and a vigorous administration. He would have no bankruptcy, whether avowed or disguised; no increase of taxes, no new loans; and the king solemnly accepted his financial system.

VII.

July.

The vices of the nobility had demoralized the CHAP. army; from the navy there was also little promise, for that department was intrusted to Sartines, who 1774. had been trained to public life only as an officer of police. The warlike nation had never had so unwarlike an administration. Maurepas had been feeble, even from his youth; the king was neither a soldier, nor capable of becoming. one.

Yet in France the traditional policy, which regarded England as a natural enemy, and sought a benefit to the one country by wounding the other, was kept alive by the Bourbon princes; by the nobles who longed to efface the shame of the last treaty of peace; by the farmers of the revenue, who were sure to derive rapid fortunes from the necessities of war; by the ministers who brooded over the perfidious conduct of the British government in 1755 with a distrust that never slumbered. France, therefore, bent its ear to catch the earliest surging of American discontent. This it discerned in the instructions from the congress of Virginia to its delegates in the continental congress. They are the first," observed the statesmen of France, "which propose to restrain. the act of navigation itself, and give pledges to oppose force by force.'

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CHAPTER VIII.

VIII.

Aug.

HOW THE MANDAMUS COUNCILLORS WERE DEALT WITH.

August, 1774.

CHAP. ON Saturday, the sixth day of August, Gage received an authentic copy of the act of parliament "for the 1774. better regulating the province of the Massachusetts bay," introduced by Lord North in April, and, as we have seen, assented to by the king on the twentieth of May. Rockingham and his friends have left on the records of the house of lords their protest against the act, "because," said they, "a definitive legal offence, by which a forfeiture of the charter is incurred, has not been clearly stated and fully proved; neither has notice of this adverse proceeding been given to the parties affected; neither have they been heard in their own defence; and because the governor and council are intrusted with powers, with which the British constitution has not trusted his majesty and privy council, so that the lives and properties of the subjects are put into their hands without control."

The principle of the statute was the concentration