the Revolution,
which checked the establishments and processes that had been directed,
encouraged, and supervised by Turgot.

To his superior enlightenment in another part of the commercial field we
owe one of the most excellent of Turgot's pieces, his Memorial on Loans
of Money. This plea for free trade in money has all the sense and
liberality of the brightest side of the eighteenth century illumination.
It was suggested by the following circumstance. At Angouleme four or
five rogues associated together, and drew bills on one another. On these
bills they borrowed money, the average rate of interest being from
eight to ten per cent. When the bills fell due, instead of paying them,
they laid informations against the lenders for taking more than the
legal rate of interest. The lenders were ruined, persons who had money
were afraid to make advances, bills were protested, commercial credit
was broken, and the trade of the district was paralysed. Turgot
prevailed upon the Council of State to withdraw the cases from the local
jurisdiction; the proceedings against the lenders were annulled, and the
institution of similar proceedings forbidden. This was a characteristic
course. The royal government was generally willing in the latter half of
the eighteenth century to redress a given case of abuse, but it never
felt itself strong enough, or had leisure enough, to deal with the
general source from which the particular grievance sprang. Turgot's
Memorial is as cogent an exposure of the mischief of Usury Laws to the
public prosperity, as the more renowned pages either of Bentham or J. B.
Say on the same subject, and it has the merit of containing an
explanation at once singularly patient and singularly intelligent, of
the origin of the popular feeling about usury and its adoption by the
legislator.

After he had been eight years at his post, Turgot was called upon to
deal with the harassing problems of a scarcity of food. In 1770 even the
maize and black grain, and the chestnuts on which the people supported
life, failed almost completely, and the failure extended over two years.
The scarcity very speedily threatened to become a famine, and all its
conditions were exasperated by the unwisdom of the authorities, and the
selfish rapacity of the landlords. It needed all the firmness and all
the circumspection of which Turgot was capable, to overcome the
difficulties which the strong forces of ignorance, prejudice, and
greediness r