The _Avis_ shows that in Artois before 1789 the representatives of the Tiers-Etat had confidence in the liberality and the common sense of the _noblesse_ and of the clergy, and that they were disposed to consider all the abuses there needing reformation in the spirit of practical compromise which had presided over and made possible the development of liberty and of progress in Holland and in England, but of which no traces are to be found in the chaotic history of the 'National Assembly' of 1789. The authors of the _Avis_, for example, point out, in dealing with the questions of the tithes and of the seignorial dues in Artois, that it is the unequal and irregular impact, above all, of those impositions to which most of the evils flowing from them must be imputed; the ill-feeling they engender between the farmer and his landlord or his pastor, the bad blood they breed between the different orders. If the charges of one sort and another upon one field of a farmer's holding amounted, as was sometimes the case, to one-fifth of the value of the crop, while upon other fields of his holding the charges amounted to no more than one-thirtieth of the value of the crop, the farmer not unnaturally gave his chief care to the fields which were least heavily encumbered, without much troubling himself as to their agricultural merits relatively to the other fields. But while the authors of the _Avis_ earnestly desired to see all this changed, and called for the most complete revision and re-organisation of the agricultural system in Artois, they raised no philosophical clamour against privileges as privileges, and they had sense enough to see that no community could afford to bring about the abolition of the most obnoxious 'privileges' at the cost of any flagrant violations of the Rights of Property. 'Whatever may have been the origin of these rights,' say the authors of the _Avis_, 'their antiquity has made them property to be respected in the hands of those who possess it. To deprive these owners of these rights would be an injustice and an act of violence of which no citizen can possibly dream. The privileged orders must be asked to divest themselves of their privileges.'