I have read a letter of a great landowner, writing in 1774 to the Intendant of his province, to induce him to open a road. This road, he said, would cause the prosperity of the village, and for several reasons; he then went on to recommend the establishment of a fair, which would double, he thought, the price of produce. With excellent motives, he added that with the assistance of a small contribution a school might be established, which would furnish the King with more industrious subjects. It was the first time that these necessary ameliorations had occurred to him; he had only thought of them in the preceding two years, which he had been compelled by a _lettre de cachet_ to spend in his own house. ‘My exile for the last two years in my estates,’ he candidly observed, ‘has convinced me of the extreme utility of these things.’ It was more especially in times of scarcity that the relaxation or total interruption of the ties of patronage and dependence, which formerly connected the great rural proprietors and the peasantry, was manifest. At such critical times the Central Government, alarmed by its own isolation and weakness, sought to revive for the nonce the personal influences or the political associations which the Government itself had destroyed; they were summoned to its aid, but they were summoned in vain, and the State was astonished to find that those persons were defunct whom it had itself deprived of life. In this extremity some of the Intendants--Turgot, for instance--in the poorest provinces, issued illegal ordinances to compel the rich landowners to feed their tenants till the next harvest. I have found, under the date of 1770, letters from several parish priests, who propose to the Intendants to tax the great landowners, both clerical and lay, ‘who possess vast estates which they do not inhabit, and from which they draw large revenues to be spent elsewhere.’ At all times the villages were infested with beggars; for, as Letronne observes, the poor were relieved in the towns, but in the country, during the winter, mendicity was their only resource. Occasionally these poor wretches were treated with great violence. In 1767 the Duc de Choiseul, then Minister, resolved suddenly to suppress mendicity in France. The correspondence of the Intendants still shows with what rigour his measures were taken. The patrol was ordered at once to take up all the beggars found in the kingdom; it is said that more than 50,000 of them were seized. Able-bodied vagabonds were to be sent to the galleys; as for the rest, more than forty workhouses were opened to receive them. It would have been more to the purpose to have opened the hearts of the rich.