The records of the last years of the Ancien Régime are consequently full of evidence of alarming and growing disorder. Townspeople complained that the beggars, driven from the country, flocked into the cities for shelter. The Intendants reported to the Council that the chief highways of the kingdom were infested with dangerous vagrants. In vain the Government multiplied its corn-laws and arrests, and endeavoured to stifle the clamours of indigence by feeding some and by punishing others. In 1767, fifty thousand beggars were arrested; but in 1777, the numbers of that unfortunate class had risen to nearly a million and a quarter. In Paris the census of 1791 declared that out of a population of six hundred and fifty thousand, over one hundred and eighteen thousand were without the means of regular subsistence. It is easy to understand how, pressed by hunger, and pursued by a rigorous penal code, many of these wandering mendicants crossed the thin line which separates extreme want from crime, and how, when the Old Monarchy suddenly collapsed, and when in the search for freedom law was for the moment lost, this large group of miserable beings, armed with brief power and long-accumulated hatred, exacted a terrible revenge for the wrongs of the labouring community in France, from whose ranks they and their ancestors had been driven by a system politically and socially unjust. Such, in the eighteenth century, were some of the conditions of life in France. Each class lived apart, entrenched in its own chilling traditions. 'Nobody,' cried Turgot, 'cares for any interest but his own.' Local patriotism, common intercourse, friendly feeling, no longer drew men of different ranks together. The sense of citizenship had generally died out. Below the others the peasant stood alone. His poverty clung to him as a garment of shame. His commonest impulses were want and fear. His love of legend made him superstitious. His ignorance made him credulous, bigoted, suspicious, easily persuaded to believe in evil. Isolated from the world, conscious of belonging to an inferior caste, encountering on all sides the privileges of his masters, and yet with no superior to care for him and no wise counsellor to guide him, blunted in feeling by long endurance, gentle, submissive, often gay, but more often brooding on the indignities which he suffered, and resenting the injustice even more than the hardship of his lot, he heard and welcomed with passionate illusion the new doctrine of human dominion, which proclaimed that men were equal, whatever their station, whatever their distress, and from that moment the attainment of equality, so easy to imagine, so hard to approach, became the commanding ideal of the poor. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: It will be understood that in the Pays d'État, the powers of the Intendants, as regarded taxation and public works, were limited and controlled by the rights of the local assemblies.]