On the other hand were the clergy--often ignorant, but generally cunning enough to play on the deeper ignorance of their flock by threats of the Hereafter, and to keep from them that knowledge which is the death-blow of superstition. Then there were the poor. Picture a peasantry whose homes were windowless, one-roomed huts of peat or clay; who subsisted, in times of plenty, on roots, chestnuts, and a little black bread; who had neither schools nor hospitals, teachers nor doctors; who were the constant prey of pestilence and famine; whose bodies were the possession of their lords, and whose dim souls were the perquisites of the priests. Consider that these people were not allowed to fence such miserable pieces of land as they might possess, lest they should interfere with my lord’s hunting; nor to manure their wretched crops, lest they should spoil the flavour of his game; nor to weed them, lest they should disturb his partridges. Consider that, if such land could have borne any fruit, a special permission was required to allow its owners to build a shed to store it in. Consider that their villages, in which they herded like beasts, were separated from other villages by roads so vile that they would have rendered commerce difficult, if legal trammels had not made it impossible. Consider that these people had been scourged for generations by hundreds of unjust and senseless laws, made by and for the benefit of their oppressors, and that they were now the victims of taxes whose very name has become an indictment, and whose description is a justification of the French Revolution. On the one flank they were whipped by the _taille_--the tax on the income and property of the poor, which absorbed one-half of the net products of their lands--and on the other by the _corvée_, which compelled them to give yearly twelve or fifteen days’ unpaid labour on the roads and the use of a horse and cart, if they had them. The _milice_ demanded from each parish its quota of soldiers (the rich being exempt as usual), and compelled the parishes to lodge passing detachments of military and to lend cattle to draw the military equipages. The _gabelle_, or tax on salt, forced each poor man to buy seven pounds of salt per annum--whether, as in one province, it was a halfpenny a pound, or, as in another, it was sixpence--and let the noble, the priest, and the Government official go free. Toll-gates were so numerous in the country that it is said fish brought from Harfleur to Paris paid eleven times its value on the journey. Wine was taxed; corn was taxed.