uce
these modifications without a violent organic revolution. Such a system
left too little course to spontaneity, and its curse is the curse of
French genius. Some of its evil effects were obvious and on the surface.
The man who should have been a soldier found himself saying mass and
hearing confessions. Vauvenargues, who was born for diplomacy or
literature, passed the flower of his days in the organised dreariness of
garrisons and marches. In our own day communities and men who lead them
have still to learn that no waste is so profuse and immeasurable, even
from the material point of view, as that of intellectual energy,
checked, uncultivated, ignored, or left without its opportunity. In
France, until a very short time before the Revolution, we can hardly
point to a single recognised usage which did not augment this waste. The
eldest son usually preserved the rank and status of the family, whether
civil or military. Turgot's eldest brother was to devote himself to
civil administration, the next to be a soldier, and Turgot himself to be
an ecclesiastic.

The second of the brothers, who began by following arms, had as little
taste for them as the future minister had for the church. It is rather
remarkable that he seems to have had the same passion for
administration, and he persuaded the government after the loss of Canada
that Guiana, to be called Equinoctial France, would if well governed
become some sort of equivalent for the northern possession. He was made
Governor-general, but he had forgotten to take the climate into account,
and the scheme came to an abortive end, involving him in a mass of
confused quarrels which lasted some years. He had a marked love for
botany, agriculture, and the like; was one of the founders of the
Society of Agriculture in 1760; and was the author of various pieces on
points of natural history.[2]

[Footnote 2: Among others, of a little volume still to be met with in
libraries, _Sur la maniere de preparer les diverses curiosites
d'histoire naturelle_ (1758).]

Turgot went as a boarder first to the college of Louis-le-Grand, then to
that of Plessis; thence to the seminary of Saint Sulpice, where he took
the degree of bachelor in theology; and from Saint Sulpice to the
Sorbonne. His childhood and youth, like that of other men who have
afterwards won love and admiration, have their stories. The affection of
one biographer records how the pocket-money with which the young Turgot
was fu