The habitual poverty of the rural population had given birth to maxims little calculated to put an end to it. ‘If nations were well off,’ said Richelieu, in his Political Testament, ‘hardly would they keep within the rules.’ In the eighteenth century this maxim was modified, but it was still believed that the peasantry would not work without the constant stimulus of necessity, and that want was the only security against idleness. That is precisely the theory which is sometimes professed with reference to the negro population of the colonies. It was an opinion so generally diffused amongst those who governed that almost all the economists thought themselves obliged to combat it at length. The primary object of the _taille_ was to enable the King to purchase recruits so as to dispense the nobles and their vassals from military service; but in the seventeenth century the obligation of military service was again imposed, as we have seen, under the name of the militia, and henceforth it weighed upon the common people only, and almost exclusively on the peasantry. The infinite number of police reports from the constables, which are still to be found amongst the records of any intendancy, all relating to the pursuit of refractory militia-men or deserters, suffice to prove that this force was not raised without obstacles. It seems, indeed, that no public burden was more insupportable to the peasantry than this: to evade it they frequently fled into the woods, where they were pursued by the armed authorities. This is the more singular, when we see the facility with which the conscription works in France in the present times. This extreme repugnance of the peasantry of France before the Revolution to the militia was attributable less to the principle of the law than to the manner in which the law was executed; more especially from the long period of uncertainty, during which it threatened those liable to be drawn (they could be taken until forty years of age, unless they were married)--from the arbitrary power of revision, which rendered the advantage of a lucky number almost useless--from the prohibition to hire a substitute--from disgust at a hard and perilous profession, in which all hope of advancement was forbidden; but, above all, from the feeling that this oppressive burden rested on themselves alone, and on the most wretched amongst themselves, the ignominy of this condition rendering its hardships more intolerable.