got as early in his career as this should have
protested against one of the most dangerous doctrines of the
_philosophe_ school. 'I have long thought,' he says, 'that our nation
needs to have marriage and true marriage preached to it. We contract
marriages ignobly, from views of ambition or interest; and as many of
them are unhappy in consequence, we may see growing up from day to day a
fashion of thinking that is extremely mischievous to the community, to
manners, to the stability of families, and to domestic happiness and
virtue.'[29] Looseness of opinion as to the family and the conditions of
its wellbeing and stability, was a flaw that ran through the whole
period of revolutionary thought. It was not surprising that the family
should come in for its share of destructive criticism, along with the
other elements of the established system, but it is a proof of the
solidity of Turgot's understanding that he should from the first have
detected the mischievousness of this side of the great social attack.
Nor did subsequent discussion with the champions of domestic license
have any effect upon his opinion.

[Footnote 29: ii. 790.]

He makes the protest which the moralist makes, and has to make in every
age, against the practice of determining the expediency of a marriage by
considerations of money or rank. There is a great abuse, he says, in the
manner in which marriages are made without the two persons most
concerned having any knowledge of one another, and solely under the
authority of the parents, who are guided either by fortune, or else by
station, that will one day translate itself into fortune. 'I know,' he
says, 'that even marriages of inclination do not always succeed. So from
the fact that sometimes people make mistakes in their choice, it is
concluded that we ought never to choose.' Condorcet, we may remember,
many years after, insisted on the banishment by public opinion of
avaricious and mercenary considerations from marriage, as one of the
most important means of diminishing the great inequalities in the
accumulation of wealth.[30]

[Footnote 30: _OEuv. de Condorcet_, vi. 245.]

In the same letter he took sides by anticipation in another cardinal
controversy of the epoch, by declaring a preference for the savage over
the civilised state to be a 'ridiculous declamation.' This strange and
fatal debate had been opened by Rousseau's memorable first Discourse,
which was given to the world in 1750. Preference f