A long stay in Languedoc would necessarily give a foreigner more favourable impressions of the social and economic state of France than he would have gained, say, in the Limousin, where Turgot was doing heroic battle against famine and maladministration. Languedoc, with its two millions of inhabitants, is described by Tocqueville as the best-ordered and most prosperous as well as the largest of all the _pays d’états_. Its roads, made and repaired without a _corvée_, were among the best in France. Smith was struck by the great canal of Burgundy, constructed some seventy years before by Riquet and kept in good repair by his family, and he saw the province incessantly spending money on developing and improving its roads and rivers. The charitable workhouses established at the royal expense in other parts of France had not been required in this comparatively happy territory. In fiscal system and credit Languedoc was incomparably superior to the rest of the kingdom. A land-tax instead of a poll-tax, few exemptions for the nobles, no farmers-general to collect taxes and fortunes. The contrast between the good local administration of Languedoc, and the fatal results of centralisation in other parts of France, was often in the mind of the author of the _Wealth of Nations_; and all that he said is fully confirmed by Tocqueville’s study of French society before the Revolution. Here is a passage that sounds like an echo of Turgot: Smith is speaking of the advantages of local administration from local funds. Under such an administration, he says, “a magnificent highroad cannot be made through a desart country where there is little or no commerce, or merely because it happens to lead to the country villa of the intendant of the province, or to that of some great lord to whom the intendant finds it convenient to make his court. A great bridge cannot be thrown over a river at a place where nobody passes, or merely to embellish the view from the windows of a neighbouring palace: things which sometimes happen in countries where works of this kind are carried on by any other revenue than that which they themselves are capable of affording.”