89, gives us the main key of this
great difference between the condition of agricultural Artois in the
eighteenth century and its condition to-day. He cites a most curious
appeal to the estates of Artois in behalf of the rural populations, from
which it appears that the citizens of the chief towns had combined with
the _noblesse_ and the higher clergy to keep the village curates and the
farmers out of the provincial assemblies, and to throw the whole burden
of taxation upon the agriculturists. 'The soil of Artois,' say the
authors of this appeal, 'is quite as good as the soil of England; and
yet the Artesian farmers can only get out of their labour on it one
quarter as much as the English do.' It was the fiscal maladministration,
they maintain, which checked the progress of agriculture and depressed
the condition of the farmers; and it is interesting to observe that
these rural reformers proposed to remedy the evils of which they
complained, not by abolishing all the privileges of the privileged
classes in a night, as did the headlong mob of the States-General at
Paris in 1789, but by securing a fairer representation of the rural
regions in the Provincial Estates, limiting the duration of the
Provincial Parliaments to three years, and deciding that one-third of
the seats should be vacated and refilled every year. This does not look
as if the Artesians of the last century were particularly deficient
either in intelligence or in practical sense.

On our way to the conference we saw several sugar factories, most of
them now abandoned, though the beet crops of Artois are still very
important; and my companions told me that the people here, with all
their traditional conservatism, are very quick to abandon any industry
which ceases to promise good returns, and to change their crops as the
conditions of the market change. We saw but few chateaux. One of the
most considerable, standing well in view from the road in the midst of
an extensive park, and approached by a long avenue of well-grown trees,
seemed to be shut up. The proprietor, the Count de----, I was told had
not visited it for two years past, one of his gamekeepers having been
murdered in a conflict with some poachers.

Under the existing laws in France, political conferences must be held
within four walls. Trafalgar Square meetings would be as impossible in
republican France as in monarchical Germany. As the commune in which M.
Labitte was to meet his constituents