"_Un ministre stipule pour le Roi, mais il travaille et craint pour lui-même._"--"Considérations" (1764). In this judgment M. Martin displays somewhat less than his usual acumen. Certain abusive privileges might have been touched: but not a rank in the social hierarchy connecting the Crown with the tiny democratic communities, would have been menaced by d'Argenson's scheme.[418] Moreover to speak of "Royalty" and "democratic society" in connection with it, is to employ large words to describe what is after all a very little thing; by using these wide and general terms the idea is dilated and swollen till it becomes grotesque. What d'Argenson proposed was simply to dismiss the score or so of clerks, tax-collectors and hangers-on who managed parochial affairs under the direction of the Sub-delegate without sympathy or regard for the wishes of the people: and to transfer these affairs to a little parish council, consisting, for example, of the neighbouring squire, the village curé, a couple of farmers, and an erudite cobbler or so, who would look after the roads, assist the poor, assess and collect the parochial taxes, and attend to all matters which were not beyond the capacity of half-a-dozen intelligent countrymen, guided and supervised by the Sub-delegate. The two poles upon which the system revolved were not "royalty" and "a democratic society,"[419] but in plain prose, the bureau of the Controller-General at Versailles, and the parish room or the inn parlour of the village of Argenson in the "généralité" of Touraine. In fact we have an almost exact parallel in the by no means fantastic relations which exist in nearly every parish in England between the local School Board and the Education Department at Whitehall. It cannot be supposed, as M. Martin would appear to imply, that the Crown and the Vestry could neither co-operate nor co-exist. D'Argenson, in drafting his proposal, presumed upon both sides at least the average amount of sense which is ordinarily devoted to matters of government. So far as he could see, there was no reason why the parish councils should ever dream of giving trouble; and he could not conceive any Government perverse enough to provoke them to a national combination for resistance. He imagined, on the other hand, that local affairs would be managed better, and could not be managed worse, than they were; and that in any case life would be awakened in the provincial districts, and that they would be rescued from the torpor of death into which they were rapidly subsiding. Surely this was something more than the illusion of a noble heart.