ther scenes in the same gay land. 'We see certain wild animals,
male and female, scattered over the fields, black, livid, all burnt by
the sun, bound to the earth that they dig and work with unconquerable
pertinacity; they have a sort of articulate voice, and when they rise on
their feet, they show a human face; in fact they are men.' That these
violent and humiliating contrasts are eternal and inevitable, is the
last word of the dominant philosophy of society; and one of the reasons
why Turgot's life is worth studying, is that he felt in so pre-eminent
a degree the urgency of lightening the destiny of that livid, wild,
hardly articulate, ever-toiling multitude.

The sum of the genealogical page is that Turgot inherited that position
which, falling to worthy souls, is of its nature so invaluable, a family
tradition of exalted courage and generous public spirit. There have been
noble and patriotic men who lacked this inheritance, but we may be sure
that even these would have fought the battle at greater advantage, if a
magnanimous preference for the larger interests had come to them as a
matter of instinctive prejudice, instead of being acquired as a matter
of reason. The question of titular aristocracy is not touched by this
consideration, for titular aristocracies postpone the larger interests
to the narrow interests of their order. And Turgot's family was only of
the secondary noblesse of the robe.

Turgot was the third son of his father. As the employments which persons
of respectable family could enter were definite and stereotyped, there
was little room for debate as to the calling for which a youth should
prepare himself. Arms, civil administration, and the church, furnished
the only three openings for a gentleman. The effects of this rigorous
adherence to artificial and exclusive rules of caste were manifestly
injurious to society, as such caste rules always are after a society has
passed beyond a certain stage. To identify the interests of the richest
and most powerful class with the interests of the church, of the army,
and of a given system of civil government, was indeed to give to that
class the strongest motives for leaving the existing social order
undisturbed. It unfortunately went too far in this direction, by
fostering the strongest possible motives of hostility to such
modifications in these gigantic departments as changing circumstances
might make needful, in the breasts of the only men who could prod