eudal despots. They were seldom the object of violence on
the part of the government; they enjoyed civil liberty, and were owners
of a portion of the soil. But all the other classes of society stood
aloof from this class, and perhaps in no other part of the world had the
peasantry ever lived so entirely alone. The effects of this novel and
singular kind of oppression deserve a very attentive consideration.

This state of things did not exist in an equal degree among any other of
the civilised nations of Europe, and even in France it was comparatively
recent. The peasantry of the fourteenth century were at once oppressed
and more relieved. The aristocracy sometimes tyrannised over them, but
never forsook them.

In the eighteenth century a French village was a community of persons,
all of whom were poor, ignorant, and coarse; its magistrates were as
rude and as contemned as the people; its syndic could not read; its
collector could not record in his own handwriting the accounts on which
the income of his neighbour and himself depended.

Not only had the former lord of the manor lost the right of governing
this community, but he had brought himself to consider it a sort of
degradation to take any part in the government of it. The central power
of the state alone took any care of the matter, and as that power was
very remote, and had as yet nothing to fear from the inhabitants of the
villages, the only care it took of them was to extract revenue.

A further burden was added. The roads began to be repaired by forced
labour only--that is to say, exclusively at the expense of the
peasantry. This expedient for making roads without paying for them was
thought so ingenious that in 1737 a circular of the Comptroller-General
Orry established it throughout France.

Nothing can better demonstrate the melancholy fate of the rural
population; the progress of society, which enriches all the other
classes, drives them to despair, and civilisation itself turns against
that class alone.

The system of forced labour, by becoming a royal right, was gradually
extended to almost all public works. In 1719 I find it was employed to
build barracks. "Parishes are to send their best workmen," said the
ordinance, "and all other works are to give way to this." The same
forced service was used to escort convicts to the galleys and beggars to
the workhouse; it had to cart the baggage of troops as often as they
changed their quarters--a burthen wh