Since, owing to the weight of taxation, no profits were to be made by farming, it was impossible that there should be a good cultivation of the soil. The amount of capital employed on land in England was at least double that employed in France. Hence, while in England famine was unknown, in France production barely equalled consumption, and scarcities were of incessant occurrence. A single bad season would force the farmer to desert his land, and with his family beg or steal. Whenever bread rose above three halfpence the pound men starved. Bread riots constantly took place in one or another province, and the country swarmed with beggars, brigands, poachers, and smugglers. Thousands of these outcasts were imprisoned, sent to the galleys, or hanged; but no severity could lessen their number, while the causes producing them remained unremoved. Adequate means of providing for the destitute there were none. A few hospitals and other charitable institutions existed. Bishops, great seigneurs, and monasteries often kept alive hundreds in seasons of scarcity. Hospitals, however, were little better than plague houses, where the sick and infirm were taken in to die, whilst private charity was partial and insufficient. There was no general system of poor relief. With the object of keeping bread at a price within the people’s reach, the corn trade was subject to a variety of regulations and restrictions. Occasionally the government made purchases of foreign corn, which was resold under price. Sometimes the prices of corn and other articles of food were fixed. In towns the price of bread was ordinarily regulated according to the price of corn by police officers, a not unnecessary precaution when the baking trade was in the hands of a close corporation. A more vicious mode of relief could hardly have been devised, but to abandon it was no easy matter. The arbitrary means taken to reduce the price of corn often had the effect of raising it, and, when successful, only tended to lessen production and lead to greater scarcities, since cutting down the profit of the already overweighted corn grower was, in reality, casting an additional tax upon him. On the other hand, it was no less true that so long as the existing order continued, a slight rise in the price of the pound of bread meant sheer starvation for the mass of artisans, and for thousands of agricultural labourers and small proprietors who were not corn growers. Accustomed to look to the government to provide them with cheap bread, in every season of scarcity these clamoured for a reduction in price, and unless authorities were complaisant, resorted to riot and pillage. ♦Voltaire.♦