Turgot himself, who deserves to rank far above all the rest for the elevation of his character and the singular merits of his genius, had not much more taste than the other economists for political liberty, or, at least, that taste came to him later, and when it was forced upon him by public opinion. To him, as well as to all the others, the chief political security seemed to be a certain kind of public instruction, given by the State, on a particular system and with a particular tendency. His confidence in this sort of intellectual drug, or, as one of his contemporaries expressed it, ‘in the mechanism of an education regulated by principles,’ was boundless. ‘I venture to assure your Majesty,’ said he, in a report to the King, proposing a plan of this nature, ‘that in ten years your people will have changed out of knowledge; and that by their attainments, by their morality, and by their enlightened zeal for your service and for that of the country, France will be raised far above all other nations. Children who are now ten years of age will then have grown up as men prepared for the public service, attached to their country, submissive, not through fear but through reason, to authority, humane to their fellow-citizens, accustomed to recognise and to respect the administration of justice.’ Political freedom had been so long destroyed in France that men had almost entirely forgotten what are its conditions and its effects. Nay, more, the shapeless ruins of freedom which still remained, and the institutions which seem to have been formed to supply its place, rendered it an object of suspicion and of prejudice. Most of the Provincial Assemblies which were still in existence retained the spirit of the Middle Ages as well as their obsolete formalities, and they checked rather than advanced the progress of society. The Parliaments, which alone stood in lieu of political bodies, had no power to prevent the evil which the Government did, and frequently prevented the good which the Government attempted to do. To accomplish the revolution which they contemplated by means of all these antiquated instruments appeared impracticable to the school of economists. To confide the execution of their plans to the nation, mistress of herself, was not more agreeable to them; for how was it possible to cause a whole people to adopt and follow a system of reform so extensive and so closely connected in all its parts? It seemed to them more easy and more proper to make the administrative power of the Crown itself the instrument of their designs.