Now, when we consider what an immense space the administrative powers of the State had so long filled in France, the numerous interests which were daily affected by them, and all that depended upon them or stood in need of their co-operation; when we reflect that it was to the Government rather than to themselves that private persons looked for the success of their own affairs, for the encouragement of their manufactures, to ensure their means of subsistence, to lay out and keep up their roads, to maintain their tranquillity, and to preserve their wealth, we shall have some idea of the infinite number of people who were personally injured by the evils from which the administration of the kingdom was suffering. But it was in the villages that the defects of the new organisation were most strongly felt; in them it not only disturbed the course of authority, it likewise suddenly changed the relative position of society, and brought every class into collision. When, in 1775, Turgot proposed to the King to reform the administration of the rural districts, the greatest difficulty he encountered, as he himself informs us, arose from the unequal incidence of taxation: for how was it possible to make men who were not all liable to contribute in the same manner, and some of whom were altogether exempt from taxation, act and deliberate together on parochial affairs relating chiefly to the assessment and the collection of those very taxes and the purposes to which they were to be applied? Every parish contained nobles and the clergy who did not pay the _taille_, peasants who were partially or wholly exempt, and others who paid it all. It was as three distinct parishes, each of which would have demanded a separate administration. The difficulty was insoluble. Nowhere, indeed, was the inequality of taxation more apparent than in the rural districts; nowhere was the population more effectually divided into different groups frequently hostile to one another. In order to make it possible to give to the villages a collective administration and a free government on a small scale, it would have been necessary to begin by subjecting all the inhabitants to an equal taxation and lessening the distance by which the classes were divided. This was not, however, the course taken when the reform was begun in 1787. Within each parish the ancient distinction of classes was maintained, together with the inequality of taxation, which was its principal token, but, nevertheless, the whole administration was placed in the hands of elective bodies. This instantly led to very singular results. When the electoral assembly met in order to choose municipal officers, the Curé and the Seigneur were not to appear; they belonged, it was alleged, to the orders of the nobility and the clergy, and this was an occasion on which the commonalty had principally to choose its representatives.