f the lands in the Generality of
Limoges were charged with dues in kind payable to the lords. As the
cultivators had for the most part no grain even for their own bread,
they naturally had no grain for the lord's dues. The lords then insisted
on payment in cash, and they insisted on estimating this payment at the
famine price of the grain. Most of them were really as needy as they
were idle and proud, and nothing is so inordinately grasping as the
indigence of class-pride. The effect of their proceedings now was to
increase their revenue fourfold and fivefold out of public calamity and
universal misery. And unfortunately the liability of the cultivators in
a given manor was _solidaire_; they were jointly and severally
responsible, and the effect of this was that even those who were in
circumstances to pay the quadrupled dues, were ruined and destroyed
without mercy in consequence of having also to pay the quadrupled dues
of their beggared neighbours. Turgot arrested this odious process by
means of an old and forgotten decree, which he prevailed upon the
parlement of Bordeaux to revive in good and due form, to the effect that
the arrears of dues in kind for 1769 should be paid at the market price
of grain when the dues were payable; that is, before the scarcity had
declared itself.

When we consider the grinding and extortionate spirit thus shown in face
of a common calamity, we may cease to wonder at the ferocity with which,
when the hour struck, the people tore away privilege, distinction, and
property itself from classes that had used all three only to ruin the
land and crush its inhabitants into the dust. And the moment that the
lord had thus transformed himself into a mere creditor, and a creditor
for goods delivered centuries ago, and long since consumed and
forgotten, then it was certain that, if political circumstances favoured
the growing economic sentiment, there would be heard again the old cry
of the Roman plebs for an agrarian law and _novae tabulae_. Nay, something
was heard that is amazingly like the cry of the modern Irish peasant. In
1776 two noteworthy incidents happened. A certain Marquis de Vibraye
threw into prison a peasant who refused to pay the _droit de cens_.
Immediately between thirty and forty peasants came to the rescue, armed
themselves, besieged the chateau, took it and sacked it, and drove the
Marquis de Vibraye away in terror. Still more significant is the second
incident, which happened