But this was not all. If these taxes were cruelly unjust, they were settled and regular. Irregular taxes could be levied at any moment at the caprice of the despot at Versailles, who no more realised the condition of his peasantry than an ordinary Briton realises the condition of a tribe of Hottentots. One, called with an exquisite irony the Tax of the Joyful Accession, had been raised when Louis the Fifteenth reached the throne of France--to topple it down the abyss. Another was the _vingtième_, or tax on the twentieth part of a franc, which could be doubled or trebled at the pleasure of the Government. Apart altogether from the taxes, the peasantry were subject to tithes exacted by the Church, itself exempt from all taxation, to large fees for christening and marrying, for getting out of the misery of this world and avoiding worse misery in the next. The clergy were on the spot to exact these dues, just as the middleman was on the spot to exact the dues for the nobles. Some of these dues and seigneurial rights are so shameful and disgusting that their very terms are unrepeatable. Even that vile age permitted many of them to lapse and become a dead letter; but the number, and the full measure of the iniquity of those that were insisted on, has never been counted, and will never be known until the Day of Judgment. What effect would hundreds of years of such oppression have on the character of the oppressed? Hopeless, filthy, degraded, superstitious with the craven superstition which made them the easy prey of their unscrupulous clergy and left them wholly sensual and stupid; as animals, without the animals’ instinctive joy of life and fearlessness of the morrow; with no ambitions for themselves or the children who turned to curse them for having brought them into such a world; with no time to dream or love, no time for the tenderness which makes life, life indeed--they toiled for a few cruel years because they feared to die, and died because they feared to live. Such were the people Turgot was sent to redeem. What wonder that many men gave up such a task in despair; that many even good men found it easier to prophesy a Golden Age in luxurious Paris than to fight hand to hand against the awful odds of such an awful reality? Turgot was thirty-four when he went to Limoges, and forty-seven when he left it. He spent there the most vigorous years of his life; if he did not do there his most famous work, he did his noblest.