He began at once. It was nothing to him that his own caste shot out the lip and scorned him. Cold and awkward in manner, regular and austere in habit, and as pure as a good woman, of course they hated him. But it was much to him that the clergy who ruled the people were also his foes, that that very people themselves were so dull and hopeless, that they too suspected his motives and concluded that because for them every change had always been for the worse, every change always would be. Slowly, gradually, he gained the favour of the priest and the love of the flock. He could not turn their hell into heaven: he could not make earth at all what Condorcet, uplifted in noble vision, would dream it yet might be. But he could do something. In 1765, he procured for Limoges an edict restoring free trade in grain in that province. Versailles, wholly abandoned to its amusements, did not in the least care whether edicts were granted or whether they were revoked. Turgot did care. He perceived that the Court was not minded to be plagued with his reforms; and he plagued it till it gave him what he wanted--to go away. Then he turned to the other taxes. The existence of a privileged class which pays nothing and devours much by its shameful exactions, is itself a monstrous thing. _Taille_ is the crowning iniquity; but it will take a Reign of Terror to kill it. In the meantime Turgot, in the teeth of the besotted ignorance and opposition of the wretched beings he was trying to help, could and did see that it was fairly administered. In place of the personal service demanded by the _corvée_, he substituted a money-tax; which was better for the taxed and better also for the roads. With regard to the _milice_, he proposed wide changes. But since the Government would not rouse itself to act on the proposals, he took advantage of its self-indulgent indifference and permitted evasions of the law; when an unlucky creature drew a black ticket in the conscription in Limoges, the new Intendant permitted him to find a substitute or to pay a fee. He also built barracks, which removed the necessity for quartering the soldiers on the poor. The fearful trammels which ‘crippled trade and industry and doomed labour to sterility,’ he in part removed. He made new roads; he became President of the first Agricultural Society in the district; he founded a veterinary college. In the teeth of strong opposition he promoted the cultivation of the potato; and by having it served daily at his own table proved to the ignorance of the peasants that it was at least safe for human food. He also introduced the growth of clover, and entirely suppressed a worrying little tax on cattle. He first brought to Limoges a properly qualified midwife, who taught her business to other women. This was the beginning of the Hospice de la Maternité. During Turgot’s Intendancy the china clay, of which the famous Limoges pottery was afterwards made, was discovered.