They went to Montpellier to see the meeting of the States of Languedoc, the most important of the six local parliaments still remaining in France. There they met Horne Tooke, who afterwards called the _Wealth of Nations_ wicked and the _Moral Sentiments_ nonsense, and Cardinal Dillon, the Archbishop of Narbonne, another of the band of Gallicised Scots. In Montpellier and Toulouse they saw many members of the parliament, and obtained an insight into the legal and administrative system of a province which enlightened Frenchmen were fond of citing as a model for the reformation of their country. Smith took rather a favourable view of French justice. The parliaments, he said, “are perhaps, in many respects, not very convenient courts of justice; but they have never been accused, they seem never even to have been suspected, of corruption.” But, though incorruptible, the Toulouse Court had been guilty of one scandalous act of fanatical injustice. In 1762 it found the unfortunate Jean Calas, a Protestant, guilty of the murder of his son, who had abjured his faith in order to join the Toulouse Bar, and then in an agony of remorse had committed suicide in his father’s house. Characteristically Smith did not allow this foul episode to distort his perspective. In his last edition of the _Moral Sentiments_ the story is told as one of those fatal accidents which “happen sometimes in all countries, even in those where justice is in general very well administered”:— “The unfortunate Calas, a man of much more than ordinary constancy (broke upon the wheel and burnt at Toulouse for the supposed murder of his own son, of which he was perfectly innocent), seemed with his last breath to deprecate, not so much the cruelty of the punishment, as the disgrace which the imputation might bring upon his memory. After he had been broke, and was just going to be thrown into the fire, the monk, who attended the execution, exhorted him to confess the crime for which he had been condemned. ‘My Father,’ said Calas, ‘can you yourself bring yourself to believe that I am guilty?’” To such a man, he thinks, “humble philosophy, which confines its views to this life, can afford but little consolation.” He must seek refuge in religion, which alone can offer him a prospect of another world of more candour, humanity, and justice. But justice was not allowed to sleep. For three years Voltaire assailed the ears of France with impassioned argument. Before Smith left Toulouse a new trial was ordered, and fifty judges, among them Turgot, revised the sentence, pronounced Calas innocent, relieved his family from infamy, and awarded them a large sum of money.