Nothing shows this more fully than the writings even of its detractors. When the long period of uneasiness which preceded the Revolution began to be felt, all sorts of new systems of society and government were concocted. The ends which these various reformers had in view were various, but the means they proposed were always the same. They wanted to employ the power of the central authority in order to destroy all existing institutions, and to reconstruct them according to some new plan of their own device; no other power appeared to them capable of accomplishing such a task. The power of the State ought, they said, to be as unlimited as its rights; all that was required was to force it to make a proper use of both. The elder Mirabeau, a nobleman so imbued with the notion of the rights of his order that he openly called the Intendants ‘intruders,’ and declared that if the appointment of the magistrates was left altogether in the hands of the Government, the courts of justice would soon be mere ‘bands of commissioners,’--Mirabeau himself looked only to the action of the central authority to realise his visionary schemes. These ideas were not confined to books; they found entrance into men’s minds, modified their customs, affected their habits, and penetrated throughout society, even into every-day life. No one imagined that any important affair could be properly carried out without the intervention of the State. Even the agriculturists--a class usually refractory to precept--were disposed to think that if agriculture did not improve, it was the fault of the Government, which did not give them sufficient advice and assistance. One of them writes to an Intendant in a tone of irritation which foreshadows the coming Revolution. ‘Why does not the Government appoint inspectors to go once a year into the provinces to examine the state of cultivation, to instruct the cultivators how to improve it--to tell them what to do with their cattle, how to fatten, rear, and sell them, and where to take them to market? These inspectors should be well paid; and the farmers who exhibited proofs of the best system of husbandry should receive some mark of honour.’ Agricultural inspectors and crosses of honour! Such means of encouraging agriculture never would have entered into the head of a Suffolk farmer.