nother effect of
the same qualification he imposes quit-claims on property on which he
has formerly given perpetual leases, and, under the terms cens, censives
(quit-rents), carpot (share in wine), champart (share in grain), agrier
(a cash commission on general produce), terrage parciere (share of
fruits). All these collections, in money or in kind, are as various as
the local situations, accidents and transactions could possibly be. In
the Bourbonnais he has one-quarter of the crop; in Berry twelve sheaves
out of a hundred. Occasionally his debtor or tenant is a community: one
deputy in the National Assembly owned a fief of two hundred casks
of wine on three thousand pieces of private property.[1229] Besides,
through the retrait censuel (a species of right of redemption), he
can "retain for his own account all property sold on the condition of
remunerating the purchaser, but previously deducting for his benefit the
lord's dues (lods and ventes)." The reader, finally, must take note
that all these restrictions on property constitute, for the seignior, a
privileged credit as well on the product as on the price of the
ground, and, for the copyholders, an unprescriptive, indivisible and
irredeemable debt.-Such are the feudal. To form an idea of them in their
totality we must always imagine the count, bishop or abbot of the tenth
century as sovereign and proprietor in his own canton. The form which
human society then takes grows out of the exigencies of near and
constant danger with a view to local defense. By subordinating all
interests to the necessities of living, in such a way as to protect the
soil by fixing on the soil, through property and its enjoyment, a troop
of brave men under the leadership of a brave chieftain. The danger
having passed away the structure became dilapidated. For a pecuniary
compensation the seigniors allowed the economical and tenacious peasant
to pick off it a good many stones. Through constraint they suffered
the king to appropriate to himself the public portion. The primitive
foundation remains, property as organized in ancient times, the fettered
or exhausted land supporting a social conformation that has melted away,
in short, an order of privileges and of thralldom of which the cause and
the purpose have disappeared. [1230]

V. They may be justified by local and general services.

All this does not suffice to render this order detrimental or even
useless. In reality, the local chief