Privileges granted in perpetuity were perpetually resumed. If we could bestow our compassion on the disappointments of a foolish vanity, the fate of those luckless persons might deserve it who purchased letters of nobility, but who were exposed during the whole of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to buy over and over again the empty honours or the unjust privileges which they had already paid for several times. Thus Louis XIV. annulled all the titles of nobility acquired in the preceding ninety-two years, though most of them had been conferred by himself; but they could only be retained upon furnishing a fresh subsidy, _all these titles having been obtained by surprise_, said the edict. The same example was duly followed by Louis XV. eighty years later. The militia-man was forbidden to procure a substitute, for fear, it was said, of raising the price of recruits to the State. Towns, corporations, and hospitals were compelled to break their own engagements in order that they might be able to lend money to the Crown. Parishes were restrained from undertaking works of public improvement, lest by such a diversion of their resources they should pay their direct taxes with less punctuality. It is related that M. Orry and M. Trudaine, of whom one was the Comptroller-General and the other the Director-General of Public Works, had formed a plan for substituting, for the forced labour of the peasantry on the roads, a rate to be levied on the inhabitants of each district for the repair of their thoroughfares. The reason which led these able administrators to forego that plan is instructive: they feared, it is said, that when a fund had been raised by such a rate it would be impossible to prevent the Treasury from appropriating the money to its own purposes, so that ere long the ratepayers would have had to support both the new money payment and the old charge of forced labour. I do not hesitate to say that no private person could have escaped the grasp of the criminal law who should have managed his own fortune as the Great Louis in all his glory managed the fortune of the nation. If you stumble upon any old establishment of the Middle Ages which maintained itself with every aggravation of its original defects in direct opposition to the spirit of the age, or upon any mischievous innovation, search to the root of the evil--you will find it to be some financial expedient perpetuated in the form of an institution. To meet the pressure of the hour new powers were called into being which lasted for centuries.