d; he
was sluggish in mind, vacillating in temper, and inexperienced in
affairs. Maurepas was recalled, to become the new king's chief adviser;
and Maurepas, at the suggestion of one of Turgot's college friends,
summoned the Intendant from Limoges, and placed him at the head of the
department of marine. This post Turgot only held for a couple of months;
he was then preferred to the great office of Controller-General. The
condition of the national finance made its administration the most
important of all the departments of the government. Turgot's policy in
this high sphere belongs to the general history of France, and there is
no occasion for us to reproduce its details here. It was mainly an
attempt to extend over the whole realm the kind of reforms which had
been tried on a small scale in the Limousin. He suppressed the
_corvees_, and he tacked the money payment which was substituted for
that burden on to the Twentieths, an impost from which the privileged
class was not exempt. 'The weight of this charge,' he made the king say
in the edict of suppression, 'now falls and must fall only on the
poorest classes of our subjects.' This truth only added to the
exasperation of the rich, and perhaps might well have been omitted.
Along with the _corvees_ were suppressed the jurandes, or exclusive
industrial corporations or trade-guilds, whose monopolies and
restrictions were so mischievous an impediment to the wellbeing of the
country. In the preamble to this edict we seem to be breathing the air,
not of Versailles in 1775, but of the Convention in 1793:--'God, when he
made man with wants, and rendered labour an indispensable resource, made
the right of work the property of every individual in the world, and
this property is the first, the most sacred, and the most
imprescriptible of all kinds of property. We regard it as one of the
first duties of our justice, and as one of the acts most of all worthy
of our benevolence, to free our subjects from every infraction of that
inalienable right of humanity.'

Again, Turgot removed a tax from certain forms of lease, with a view to
promote the substitution of a system of farming for the system of
_metayers_. He abolished an obstructive privilege by which the Hotel
Dieu had the exclusive right of selling meat during Lent. The whole of
the old incoherent and vexatious police of the corn-markets was swept
away. Finally, he inspired the publication of a short but most
important writing,