required fresh capital to work them up. The consequence was that, although the sale of Church lands must in very many cases have been of advantage to the peasants, yet in some cases the small buyers, who had expended all their savings in the purchase, were ruined by the rash investment, and joined the great army of the needy poor. The causes which led to disquiet in the country were reproduced still more strongly in the towns. To Paris and the great provincial cities flocked many of those who could not find subsistence in the country. There work might be more easily forthcoming. There, at any rate, it was easier to make their voices heard. But in Paris the same dislocation of industry prevailed. The National Assembly had abolished the guilds and the old restrictions upon trade, and had established complete freedom of labour. But a change so large, however beneficial it might be--and there were not wanting politicians in Paris, among whose voices Marat's diatribes rose most shrilly, to criticise the Assembly's action--could not be accomplished without much confusion. Moreover, the influx from the provinces tended to make employment scarcer, and the influence of political excitement did not help towards tranquillity. The consequence was that the general destitution did not disappear. In vain the State came forward to appease it by opening public workshops in Paris. The regular work and the high wages offered, which were actually equal to the highest day-wages then to be obtained in France, drew applicants from all quarters, but only increased the difficulties of the problem. The great towns in the departments followed the example of the authorities in Paris. Toulouse and Amiens, Besançon and Lyons, and many other places speedily found that they had thousands of applicants for work which nobody required to have done, and which was generally neglected by those who undertook to do it. In Paris the numbers employed by the municipality rose to twenty and then to thirty thousand, but still the outlook remained as unsatisfactory as ever, and the discontent of the poorest classes unallayed.