er the _ancien regime_ did what he liked with his neighbour's
property--that neighbour being a landlord--as cheerily as the manacled
Celt of Mayo or Tipperary in our own times. Two years before the
Revolution, in 1787, the assembly of the Generality of Amiens, by its
president the Duc d'Havre, vainly urged the royal government to take
resolute action in this matter. With the Revolution, of course, things
grew worse very rapidly. The _depointes_ became ardent lovers of
liberty, equality, and fraternity; tore up all their leases, sent their
landlords and the land-grabbers to the guillotine, or into emigration as
traitors, and made themselves proprietors, in fee simple. There seems to
be no doubt that the traditions of this _coutume de mauvais gre_ (which
obviously had much more to do with the politics of Picardy a century ago
than either Voltaire or Rousseau) still survive in the Department of the
Somme, and every now and then break out in agrarian outrages,
rick-burnings, and general incendiarism, whenever leases fall in and
landlords try to raise their rents on the shallow pretext that land has
risen in value.

While these traditions show that there was no lack of energy and force
among the 'downtrodden' Picard peasantry before the Revolution of 1789,
the local history of the province also proves that the liberal ideas
which are commonly supposed to have been introduced into France by the
Revolution were at work in Picardy among the _noblesse_ and the clergy
long before. The _corvee_, for example, of which we hear so much in
many so-called histories of the French Revolution, was abolished under
Louis XVI. in Picardy, before the States-General of 1789 were convened.

That the _corvee_, in itself, cannot have been the absolutely
intolerable thing it is commonly supposed to have been may be inferred,
I think, from the fact that, under the name of _prestation en nature_,
it still exists in many parts of the French Republic. It figures in all
the schedules of departmental taxation which I have seen down to the
year 1889; and, for that matter, it existed in New England down to a
very recent date, if it does not now exist there. It was obviously
liable to abuse, and doubtless was abused, and the Intendant of Picardy,
M. d'Aguay, made a striking speech, on the benefits to be expected from
its abolition, to the Provincial Parliament in 1787. From this speech we
learn that the money value of the _corvee_ in hand had been computed