But the Crown itself took a prominent part in the spoliation of the poor. Adopting for public purposes the old feudal institution of the Corvée, the Government summoned the peasants at certain seasons of the year to leave their fields, without compensation, in order to make and repair the highways; and by a peculiar irony, although the great thoroughfares were thus maintained solely at the peasants' expense, the roads which the peasants really needed, the cross-roads in agricultural districts, were left to ruin and neglect. More odious still were the demands of the militia service. Every unmarried man up to forty years of age could be called upon for this oppressive duty. No substitution was allowed. Although for the wealthy the exemptions were innumerable, for the poorest class no exemption was permitted. Improvident marriages offered the only means of escape. The approach of the Government's agent was the signal for panic and disorder, and the miserable villagers fled for concealment to the woods. Even more grievous than the Corvée and the militia were the abuses which pervaded the whole system of taxation. The heaviest of all the taxes was the terrible burden of the Taille, a direct tax levied sometimes on property and sometimes on income, falling almost entirely on the poor--alike on the struggling landowner and on the landless labourer--assessed without order or method, constantly varying and constantly increased. Every year in the rural districts some unfortunate villager was selected to act as collector of the Taille. He alone had to decide how much each of his neighbours was worth, and how much he must extort from them to satisfy the Government, and if his efforts or his calculations failed, his own property and person were responsible for the amount. The opportunities for abuse in such a system, for the satisfaction of personal jealousies and grudges, are as obvious as its unfairness towards those on whom the office was inflicted. 'The office of collector,' cried Turgot, 'drives to despair and frequently to ruin all those on whom it is imposed.' In order to escape the Taille, the peasant strenuously concealed his savings. If, in spite of his Government, he prospered, he dared do nothing to give an air of comfort to his home. We find him in one case entreating his landlord not to tile the roof of his cottage, because such a sign of prosperity would mean for him an increase of taxation. It was the object of every man to seem desperately poor. Then besides the Taille, the peasant had to pay the accessory taxes, which in process of time had been assimilated with it; the Poll-tax and the Vingtièmes, imposts imposed by Louis XIV on all alike, but the weight of which the powerful classes had contrived to shift on to the shoulders of the weak; the road-tax, when the Corvées were abolished; the tax of the franc-fief, whenever he happened to own lands which had once been the lands of nobles; and always, apart from the demands of the Exchequer,