In the eighteenth century the number and the name of the parochial officers varied in the different provinces of France. The ancient records show that these officers were more numerous when local life was more active, and that they diminished in number as that life declined. In most of the parishes they were, in the eighteenth century, reduced to two persons--the one named the ‘Collector,’ the other most commonly named the ‘Syndic.’ Generally, these parochial officers were either elected, or supposed to be so; but they had everywhere become the instruments of the State rather than the representatives of the community. The Collector levied the _taille_, under the direct orders of the Intendant. The Syndic, placed under the daily direction of the Sub-delegate of the Intendant, represented that personage in all matters relating to public order or affecting the Government. He became the principal agent of the Government in relation to military service, to the public works of the State, and to the execution of the general laws of the kingdom. The Seigneur, as we have already seen, stood aloof from all these details of government; he had even ceased to superintend them, or to assist in them; nay more, these duties, which had served in earlier times to keep up his power, appeared unworthy of his attention in proportion to the progressive decay of that power. It would at last have been an offence to his pride to require him to attend to them. He had ceased to govern; but his presence in the parish and his privileges effectually prevented any good government from being established in the parish in place of his own. A private person differing so entirely from the other parishioners--so independent of them, and so favoured by the laws--weakened or destroyed the authority of all rules. The unavoidable contact with such a person in the country had driven into the towns, as I shall subsequently have occasion to show, almost all those inhabitants who had either a competency or education, so that none remained about the Seigneur but a flock of ignorant and uncultivated peasants, incapable of managing the administration of their common interests. ‘A parish,’ as Turgot had justly observed, ‘is an assemblage of cabins, and of inhabitants as passive as the cabins they dwell in.’ The administrative records of the eighteenth century are full of complaints of the incapacity, indolence, and ignorance of the parochial collectors and syndics. Ministers, Intendants, Sub-delegates, and even the country gentlemen, are for ever deploring these defects; but none of them had traced these defects to their cause.