he
used to tell Stewart, the presidents and counsellors of the
Parliament, who were noted, like their class in other parliament
towns, for their hospitality, and noted above those of other
parliament towns for keeping up the old tradition of blending their
law with a love of letters. They were men, moreover, of proved
patriotism and independence; in no other society would Smith be likely
to hear more of the oppressed condition of the peasantry, and the
necessity for thoroughgoing reforms. In those days the king's edict
did not run in a province till it was registered by the local
parliament, and the Parliament of Toulouse often used this privilege
of theirs to check bad measures. They had in 1756 remonstrated with
the king against the _corvee_, declaring that the condition of the
peasantry of France was "a thousand times less tolerable than the
condition of the slaves in America." At the very moment of Smith's
first arrival in Toulouse they were all thrown in prison--or at least
put under arrest in their own houses--for refusing to register the
_centieme denier_, and Smith no doubt had that circumstance in his
mind when he animadverted in the _Wealth of Nations_ on the violence
practised by the French Government to coerce its parliaments. He
thought very highly of those parliaments as institutions, stating that
though not very convenient courts of law, they had never been accused
or even suspected of corruption, and he gives a curious reason for
their incorruptibility; it was because they were not paid by salary,
but by fees dependent on their diligence.

During Smith's residence in Toulouse the town was raging (as Abbe
Colbert mentions in his letters to Hume) about one of the judgments of
this Parliament, and for the most part, strangely enough, taking the
Parliament's side. This was its judgment in the famous Calas case, to
which Smith alludes in the last edition of his _Theory_. Jean Calas,
it may be remembered, had a son who had renounced his Protestantism in
order to become eligible for admission to the Toulouse bar, and then
worried himself so much about his apostasy that he committed suicide
in his father's house; and the father was unjustly accused before the
Parliament of the town of having murdered the youth on account of his
apostasy, was found guilty without a particle of proof, and then
broken on the wheel and burnt on the 9th of March 1762. But the great
voice of Voltaire rose against this judicial atroc