The scarcity very speedily threatened to become a famine, and all its conditions were exasperated by the unwisdom of the authorities, and the selfish rapacity of the landlords. It needed all the firmness and all the circ.u.mspection of which Turgot was capable, to overcome the difficulties which the strong forces of ignorance, prejudice, and greediness raised up against him.
His first battle was on an issue which is painfully familiar to our own Indian administrators at the present time. In 1764, an edict had been promulgated decreeing free trade in grain, not with foreign countries, but among the different provinces of the kingdom. This edict had not made much way in the minds either of the local officials or of the people at large, and the presence of famine made the free and unregulated export of food seem no better than a cruel and outrageous paradox. The parlement of Bordeaux at once suspended the edict of 1764.
They ordered that all dealers in grain, farmers of land, owners of land, of whatever rank, quality, or condition, should forthwith convey to the markets of their district "_a sufficient quant.i.ty_" of grain to provision the said markets. The same persons were forbidden to sell either by wholesale or retail any portion of the said grain at their own granaries. Turgot at once procured from the Council at Versailles the proper instrument for checking this impolitic interference with the free circulation of grain, and he contrived this instrument in such conciliatory terms as to avoid any breach with the parlement, whose motives, for that matter, were respectable enough. In spite, however, of the action of the government, popular feeling ran high against free markets. Tumultuous gatherings of famishing men and women menaced the unfortunate grain-dealers. Waggoners engaged in carrying grain away from a place where it was cheaper, to another place where it was dearer, were violently arrested in their business, and terrified from proceeding.
Hunger prevented people from discerning the unanswerable force of the argument that if the grain commanded a higher price somewhere else, that was a sure sign of the need there being more dire. The local officials were as hostile as their humbler neighbours. At the town of Turenne, they forbade grain to be taken away, and forced the owners of it to sell it on the spot at the market rate. At the town of Angouleme the lieutenant of police took upon himself to order that all the grain destined for the Limousin should be unloaded and stored at Angouleme.
Turgot brought a heavy hand to bear on these breakers of administrative discipline, and readily procured such sanction as his authority needed from the Council.
One of the most interesting of the measures to which Turgot resorted in meeting the dest.i.tution of the country, was the establishment of the Charitable Workshops. Some of the advocates of the famous National Workshops of 1848 have appealed to this example of the severe patriot, for a sanction to their own economic policy. It is not clear that the logic of the Socialist is here more remorseless than usual. If the State may set up workshops to aid people who are short of food because the harvest has failed, why should it not do the same when people are short of food because trade is bad, work scarce, and wages intolerably low? Of course Turgot"s answer would have been that remorseless logic is the most improper instrument in the world for a business of rough expedients, such as government is. There is a vital difference in practice between opening a public workshop in the exceptional emergency of a famine, and keeping public workshops open as a normal interference with the free course of industrial activity. For the moment the principle may appear to be the same, but in reality the application of the principle means in the latter case the total disorganisation of industry; in the former it means no more than a temporary breach of the existing principles of organisation, with a view to its speedier revival. To invoke Turgot as a dabbler in Socialism because he opened _ateliers de charite_, is as unreasonable as it would be to make an English minister who should suspend the Bank Charter Act in a crisis, into the champion of an inconvertible paper currency. Turgot always regarded the sums paid in his works, not as wages, but as alms. All that he urged was that "the best and most useful kind of alms consists in providing means for earning them." To prevent the workers from earning aid with as little trouble to themselves as possible, he recommended payment by the piece and not by the day. To check workers from flocking in from their regular employments, he insisted on the wages being kept below the ordinary rate, and he urged the propriety of driving as sharp bargains as possible in fixing the price of the piece of work. To prevent the dissipation of earnings at the tavern, he paid not in money, but in leathern tokens, that were only current in exchange for provisions. All these regulations mark a wide gulf between the Economist of 1770 and the Socialist of 1848. n.o.body was sterner than Turgot against beggars, the inevitable scourge of every country where the evils of vicious economic arrangements are aggravated by the mischievous views of the Catholic clergy, first, as to the duties of promiscuous almsgiving, and second, as to the virtue of improvident marriages. In 1614 the States General had been for hanging all mendicants, and Colbert had sent them to the galleys. Turgot was less rigorous than that, but he would not suffer his efforts for the economic restoration of his province to be thwarted by the influx of these devouring parasites, and he sent every beggar on whom hands could be laid to prison.
The story of the famine in the Limousin brings to light some instructive facts as to the temper of the lords and rich proprietors on the eve of the changes that were to destroy them. Turgot had been specially anxious that as much as possible of what was necessary for the relief of distress should be done by private persons. He knew the straits of the government. He knew how hard it would be to extract from it the means of repairing a deficit in his own finances. Accordingly he invited the landowners, not merely to contribute sums of money in return for the public works carried on in their neighbourhood, but also, by way of providing employment to their indigent neighbours, to undertake such works as they should find convenient on their own estates. The response was disappointing. "The districts," he wrote in 1772, "where I have works on foot, do not give me reason to hope for much help on the side of the generosity of the n.o.bles and the rich landowners. The Prince de Soubise is so far the only person who has given anything for the works that have been executed in his duchy." Nor was abstinence from generosity the worst part of this failure in public spirit. The same n.o.bles and landowners who refused to give, did not refuse to take away.
Most of them proceeded at once to dismiss their _metayers_, the people who farmed their lands in consideration of a fixed proportion of the produce. Turgot, in an ordinance of admirable gravity, remonstrated against this harsh and impolitic proceeding. He pointed out that the unfortunate wretches, thus stripped of every resource, would have to leave the district, abandoning their wives and children to the charity of villages that were already overburdened with the charge of their own people. To cast this additional load on the villages was all the more unjust, because the owners of land had been exempted from one-half of the taxes levied on the owners of other property, exactly because the former were expected to provide for their own peasants. It was a claim less of humanity than of bare justice, that the landowners should do something for men with whom their relations had been so close as to be almost domestic, and to whose hard toil their masters owed all that they possessed. As a mere matter of self-interest, moreover, apart alike from both justice and humanity, the death or flight of the labourers would leave the proprietors helpless when the next good season came, and for want of hands the land would be doomed to barrenness for years to come, to the grievous detriment no less of the landowners than of the whole people of the realm. Accordingly, Turgot ordered all those who had dismissed their _metayers_ to take them back again, and he enacted generally that all proprietors, of whatever quality or condition, and whether privileged or not, should be bound to keep and support until the next harvest all the labourers who had been on their land in the previous October, as well women and children as men.
Turgot"s policy in this matter is more instructive as to the social state of France, than it may at first sight appear. At first sight we are astonished to find the austere economist travelling so far from the orthodox path of free contract as to order a landowner to furnish at his own cost subsistence for his impoverished tenants. But the truth is that the _metayer_ was not a free tenant in the sense which we attach to the word. "_In Limousin_," says Arthur Young, "_the metayers are considered as little better than menial servants_." And it is not going beyond the evidence to say that they were even something lower than menial servants; they were really a kind of serf-caste. They lived in the lowest misery. More than half of them were computed to be deeply in debt to the proprietors. In many cases they were even reduced every year to borrow from their landlord, before the harvest came round, such coa.r.s.e bread of mixed rye and barley as he might choose to lend them. What Turgot therefore had in his mind was no relation of free contract, though it was that legally, but a relation which partly resembled that of a feudal lord to his retainer, and partly--as Sir Henry Maine has hinted--that of a planter to his negroes. It is less surprising, then, that Turgot should have enforced some of the responsibilities of the lord and the planter.
The n.o.bles had resort to a still more indefensible measure than the expulsion of their _metayers_. Most of the lands in the Generality of Limoges were charged with dues in kind payable to the lords. As the cultivators had for the most part no grain even for their own bread, they naturally had no grain for the lord"s dues. The lords then insisted on payment in cash, and they insisted on estimating this payment at the famine price of the grain. Most of them were really as needy as they were idle and proud, and nothing is so inordinately grasping as the indigence of cla.s.s-pride. The effect of their proceedings now was to increase their revenue fourfold and fivefold out of public calamity and universal misery. And unfortunately the liability of the cultivators in a given manor was _solidaire_; they were jointly and severally responsible, and the effect of this was that even those who were in circ.u.mstances to pay the quadrupled dues, were ruined and destroyed without mercy in consequence of having also to pay the quadrupled dues of their beggared neighbours. Turgot arrested this odious process by means of an old and forgotten decree, which he prevailed upon the parlement of Bordeaux to revive in good and due form, to the effect that the arrears of dues in kind for 1769 should be paid at the market price of grain when the dues were payable; that is, before the scarcity had declared itself.
When we consider the grinding and extortionate spirit thus shown in face of a common calamity, we may cease to wonder at the ferocity with which, when the hour struck, the people tore away privilege, distinction, and property itself from cla.s.ses that had used all three only to ruin the land and crush its inhabitants into the dust. And the moment that the lord had thus transformed himself into a mere creditor, and a creditor for goods delivered centuries ago, and long since consumed and forgotten, then it was certain that, if political circ.u.mstances favoured the growing economic sentiment, there would be heard again the old cry of the Roman plebs for an agrarian law and _novae tabulae_. Nay, something was heard that is amazingly like the cry of the modern Irish peasant. In 1776 two noteworthy incidents happened. A certain Marquis de Vibraye threw into prison a peasant who refused to pay the _droit de cens_.
Immediately between thirty and forty peasants came to the rescue, armed themselves, besieged the chateau, took it and sacked it, and drove the Marquis de Vibraye away in terror. Still more significant is the second incident, which happened shortly after. A relative of the Duke of Mortemart, shooting on his property, was attacked by peasants who insisted that he should cease his sport. They treated him with much brutality, and even threatened to fire on him and his attendants, "_claiming to be free masters of their lands_." Here was the main root of the great French Revolution. A fair consideration of the details of such an undertaking as Turgot"s administration of the Limousin helps us to understand two things: first, that all the ideas necessary for the pacific transformation of French society were there in the midst of it; second, that the system of privilege had fostered such a spirit in one cla.s.s, and the reaction against the inconsiderate manifestation of that spirit was so violent in the other cla.s.s, that good political ideas were vain and inapplicable.
It is curious to find that, in the midst of his beneficent administration, Turgot was rating practical work very low in comparison with the achievements of the student and the thinker. "You are very fortunate," Condorcet said to him, "in having a pa.s.sion for the public good, and in being able to satisfy it; it is a great consolation, and of a very superior order to the consolation of mere study." "Nay," replied Turgot, in his next letter, "whatever you may say, I believe that the satisfaction derived from study is superior to any other kind of satisfaction. I am perfectly convinced that one may be, through study, a thousand times more useful to men than in any of our subordinate posts.
There we torment ourselves, and often without any compensating success, to secure some small benefits, while we are the involuntary instrument of evils that are by no means small. All our small benefits are transitory, while the light that a man of letters is able to diffuse must, sooner or later, destroy all the artificial evils of the human race, and place it in a position to enjoy all the goods that nature offers." It is clear that we can only accept Turgot"s preference, on condition that the man of letters is engaged on work that seriously advances social interests and adds something to human stature. Most literature, nearly all literature, is distinctly subordinate and secondary; it only serves to pa.s.s the time of the learned or cultured cla.s.s, without making any definite mark either on the mental habits of men and women, or on the inst.i.tutions under which they live. Compared with such literature as this, the work of an administrator who makes life materially easier and more hopeful to the half-million of persons living in the Generality of Limoges or elsewhere, must be p.r.o.nounced emphatically the worthier and more justly satisfactory.[44]
[Footnote 44: See vol. i. p. 290.]
Turgot himself, however, found time, in his industry at Limoges, to make a contribution to a kind of literature which has seriously modified the practical arrangements and social relations of the western world. In 1766 he published his Essay on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth--a short but most pithy treatise, in which he antic.i.p.ated some of the leading economic principles of that greater work by Adam Smith, which was given to the world ten years later. Turgot"s Essay has none of the breadth of historic outlook, and none of the amplitude of concrete ill.u.s.trations from real affairs, which make the Wealth of Nations so deeply fertile, so persuasive, so interesting, so thoroughly alive, so genuinely enriching to the understanding of the judicious reader. But the comparative dryness of Turgot"s too concise form does not blind the historian of political economy to the merit of the substance of his propositions. It was no small proof of originality and enlightenment to precede Adam Smith by ten years in the doctrines of free trade, of free industry, of loans on interest, of the const.i.tutive elements of price, of the effects of the division of labour, of the processes of the formation of capital. The pa.s.sage on interest will bear reproducing once more:--"We may regard the rate of interest as a kind of level, below which all labour, all cultivation, all industry, all commerce ceases. It is like a sea spreading out over a vast district; the tops of the mountains rise above the waters and form fertile and cultivated islands.
If the sea by any chance finds an outlet, then in proportion as it goes down, first the slopes, next the plains and valleys, appear and clothe themselves with productions of every kind. It is enough that the sea rises or falls by a foot, to inundate vast sh.o.r.es, or to restore them to cultivation and plenty." There are not many ill.u.s.trations at once so apt and so picturesque as this, but most of the hundred paragraphs that make up the Reflections are, notwithstanding one or two of the characteristic crotchets of Quesnai"s school, both accurate and luminous.
V.
In May 1774 Lewis XV. died. His successor was only twenty years old; he was sluggish in mind, vacillating in temper, and inexperienced in affairs. Maurepas was recalled, to become the new king"s chief adviser; and Maurepas, at the suggestion of one of Turgot"s college friends, summoned the Intendant from Limoges, and placed him at the head of the department of marine. This post Turgot only held for a couple of months; he was then preferred to the great office of Controller-General. The condition of the national finance made its administration the most important of all the departments of the government. Turgot"s policy in this high sphere belongs to the general history of France, and there is no occasion for us to reproduce its details here. It was mainly an attempt to extend over the whole realm the kind of reforms which had been tried on a small scale in the Limousin. He suppressed the _corvees_, and he tacked the money payment which was subst.i.tuted for that burden on to the Twentieths, an impost from which the privileged cla.s.s was not exempt. "The weight of this charge," he made the king say in the edict of suppression, "now falls and must fall only on the poorest cla.s.ses of our subjects." This truth only added to the exasperation of the rich, and perhaps might well have been omitted.
Along with the _corvees_ were suppressed the jurandes, or exclusive industrial corporations or trade-guilds, whose monopolies and restrictions were so mischievous an impediment to the wellbeing of the country. In the preamble to this edict we seem to be breathing the air, not of Versailles in 1775, but of the Convention in 1793:--"G.o.d, when he made man with wants, and rendered labour an indispensable resource, made the right of work the property of every individual in the world, and this property is the first, the most sacred, and the most imprescriptible of all kinds of property. We regard it as one of the first duties of our justice, and as one of the acts most of all worthy of our benevolence, to free our subjects from every infraction of that inalienable right of humanity."
Again, Turgot removed a tax from certain forms of lease, with a view to promote the subst.i.tution of a system of farming for the system of _metayers_. He abolished an obstructive privilege by which the Hotel Dieu had the exclusive right of selling meat during Lent. The whole of the old incoherent and vexatious police of the corn-markets was swept away. Finally, he inspired the publication of a short but most important writing, Boncerf"s _Inconvenients des Droits Feodaux_, in which, without criticising the origin of the privileges of the n.o.bles, the author showed how much it would be to the advantage of the lords to accept a commutation of their feudal dues. What was still more exasperating both to n.o.bles and lawyers, was the author"s hardy a.s.sertion that if the lords refused the offer of their va.s.sals, the king had the power to settle the question for them by his own legislative authority. This was the most important and decisive of the pre-revolutionary tracts.
Equally violent prejudices and more sensitive interests were touched by two other sets of proposals. The minister began to talk of a new territorial contribution, and a great survey and re-a.s.sessment of the land. Then followed an edict restoring in good earnest the free circulation of corn within the kingdom. Turgot was a partisan of free trade in its most entire application; but for the moment he contented himself with the free importation of grain and its free circulation at home, without sanctioning its exportation abroad. Apart from changes thus organically affecting the industry of the country, Turgot dealt sternly with certain corruptions that had crept into the system of tax-farming, as well as with the monstrous abuses of the system of court-pensions.
The measures we have enumerated were all excellent in themselves, and the state of the kingdom was such as urgently to call for them. They were steps towards the construction of a fabric of freedom and justice.
But they provoked a host of bitter and irreconcilable enemies, while they raised up no corresponding host of energetic supporters. The reason of the first of these circ.u.mstances is plain enough, but the second demands a moment"s consideration. That the country clergy should denounce the Philosopher, as they called him, from the pulpit and the steps of the altar, was natural enough. Many even of his old colleagues of the Encyclopaedia had joined Necker against the minister. The greatest of them all, it is true, stood by Turgot with unfailing staunchness; a shower of odes, diatribes, dialogues, allegories, dissertations, came from the Patriarch of Ferney to confound and scatter the enemies of the new reforms. But the people were unmoved. If Turgot published an explanation of the high price of grain, they perversely took explanation for gratulation, and thought the Controller preferred to have bread dear. If he put down seditious risings with a strong hand, they insisted that he was in nefarious league with the corn-merchants and the bakers.
How was it that the people did not recognise the hand of a benefactor?
The answer is that they suspected the source of the new reforms too virulently to judge them calmly. For half a century, as Condorcet says pregnantly, they had been undergoing the evils of anarchy, while they supposed that they were feeling those of despotism. The error was grave, but it was natural, and one effect of it was to make every measure that proceeded from the court odious. Hence, when the parlements took up their judicial arms in defence of abuses and against reforms, the common people took sides with them, for no better reason than that this was to take sides against the king"s government. Malesherbes in those days, and good writers since, held that the only safe plan was to convoke the States-General. They would at least have shared the responsibility with the crown. Turgot rejected this opinion. By doctrine, no less than by temperament, he disliked the control of a government by popular bodies.
Everything for the people, nothing by the people: this was the maxim of the Economists, and Turgot held it in all its rigour. The royal authority was the only instrument that he could bring himself to use.
Even if he could have counted on a Frederick or a Napoleon, the instrument would hardly have served his purposes; as things were, it was a broken reed, not a fine sword, that he had to his hand.
The National a.s.sembly and the Convention went to work exactly in the same stiff and absolute spirit as Turgot. They were just as little disposed to gradual, moderate, and compromising ways as he. But with them the absolute authority on which they leaned was real and most potent; with him it was a shadow. We owe it to Turgot that the experiment was complete: he proved that the monarchy of divine right was incapable of reform.[45] As it has been sententiously expressed, "The part of the sages was now played out; room was now for the men of destiny."
[Footnote 45: Foncin"s _Ministere de Turgot_, p. 574.]
If the repudiation of a popular a.s.sembly was the cardinal error in Turgot"s scheme of policy, there were other errors added. The publication of Boncerf"s attack on the feudal dues, with the undisguised sanction of the minister, has been justly condemned as a grave imprudence, and as involving a forgetfulness of the true principles of government and administration, that would certainly not have been committed either by Colbert, in whom Turgot professed to seek his model, nor by Gournai, who had been his master. It was a broad promise of reforms which Turgot was by no means sure of being able to persuade the king and his council to adopt. By prematurely divulging his projects, it augmented the number of his adversaries, without being definite enough to bring new friends.[46] Again, Turgot did nothing to redeem it by personal conciliatoriness in carrying out the designs of a benevolent absolutism. The Count of Provence, afterwards Lewis XVIII., wrote a satire on the government during Turgot"s ministry, and in it there is a picture of the great reformer as he appeared to his enemies: "There was then in France an awkward, heavy, clumsy creature; born with more rudeness than character, more obstinacy than firmness, more impetuosity than tact; a charlatan in administration no less than in virtue, exactly formed to get the one decried and to disgust the world with the other; made harsh and distant by his self-love, and timid by his pride; as much a stranger to men, whom he had never known, as to the public weal, which he had never seen aright; this man was called Turgot."
[Footnote 46: See Mauguin"s _Etudes Historiques sur l"Administration de l"Agriculture_, i. 353.]
It is a mistake to take the word of political adversaries for a man"s character, but adversaries sometimes only say out aloud what is already suspected by friends. The coa.r.s.e account given by the Count of Provence shows us where Turgot"s weakness as a ruler may have lain. He was distant and stiff in manner, and encouraged no one to approach him. Even his health went against him, for at a critical time in his short ministry he was confined to bed by gout for four months, and he could see n.o.body save clerks and secretaries. The very austerity, loftiness, and purity, which make him so reverend and inspiring a figure in the pages of the n.o.ble-hearted Condorcet, may well have been impediments in dealing with a society that, in the fatal words of the Roman historian, could bear neither its disorders nor their remedies.
The king had once said pathetically: "It is only M. Turgot and I who love the people." But even with the king, there were points at which the minister"s philosophic severity strained their concord. Turgot was the friend of Voltaire and Condorcet; he counted Christianity a form of superst.i.tion; and he, who as a youth had refused to go through life wearing the mask of the infidel abbe, had too much self-respect in his manhood to practise the rites and uses of a system which he considered a degradation of the understanding. One day the king said to Maurepas: "You have given me a Controller-general who never goes to ma.s.s." "Sire,"
replied that ready worldling, "the Abbe Terray always went"--and Terray had brought the government to bankruptcy. But Turgot hurt the king"s conscience more directly than by staying away from ma.s.s and confession.
Faithful to the long tradition of his ancestors, Lewis XVI. wished the ceremony of his coronation to take place at Rheims. Turgot urged that it should be performed at Paris, and as cheaply as possible. And he advanced on to still more delicate ground. In the rite of consecration, the usage was that the king should take an oath to pursue all heretics.
Turgot demanded the suppression of this declaration of intolerance. It was pointed out to him that it was only a formality. But Turgot was one of those severe and scrupulous souls, to whom a wicked promise does not cease to be degrading by becoming hypocritical. And he was perfectly justified. It was only by the gradual extinction of the vestiges of her ancient barbarisms, as occasion offered, that the Church could have escaped the crash of the Revolution. Meanwhile, the king and the priests had their own way: the king was crowned at Rheims, and the priests exacted from him an oath to be unjust, oppressive, and cruel towards a portion of his subjects. Turgot could only remonstrate; but the philosophic memorial in which he protested in favour of religious freedom and equality, gave the king a serious shock.
We have no s.p.a.ce, nor would it be worth while, to describe the intrigues which ended in the minister"s fall. Already in the previous volume, we have referred to the immediate and decisive share which, the queen had in his disgrace.[47] He was dismissed in the beginning of May 1776, having been in power little more than twenty months. "You are too hurried," Malesherbes had said to him. "You think you have the love of the public good; not at all; you have a rage for it, for a man must be nothing short of enraged to insist on forcing the hand of the whole world." Turgot replied, more pathetically perhaps than reasonably, "What, you accuse me of haste, and you know that in my family we die of gout at fifty!"
[Footnote 47: See vol. i. p. 31.]
There is something almost tragic in the joy with which Turgot"s dismissal was received on all sides. "I seem," said Marmontel, "to be looking at a band of brigands in the forest of Bondy, who have just heard that the provost-marshal has been discharged." Voltaire and Condorcet were not more dismayed by the fall of the minister, than by the insensate delight which greeted the catastrophe. "This event," wrote Condorcet, "has changed all nature in my eyes. I have no longer the same pleasure in looking at those fair landscapes over which he would have shed happiness and contentment. The sight of the gaiety of the people wrings my heart. They dance and sport, as if they had lost nothing. Ah, we have had a delicious dream, but it has been all too short." Voltaire was equally inconsolable, and still more violent in the expression of his grief. When he had become somewhat calmer, he composed those admirable verses,--_To a Man_:
Philosophe indulgent, ministre citoyen, Qui ne cherchas le vrai que pour faire le bien, Qui d"un peuple leger et trop ingrat peut-etre Preparais le bonheur et celui de son maitre, Ce qu"on nomme disgrace a paye tes bienfaits.
Le vrai prix de travail n"est que de vivre en paix.
Turgot at first showed some just and natural resentment at the levity with which he had been banished from power, and he put on no airs of theatrical philosophy. He would have been untrue to the sincerity of his character, if he had affected indifference or satisfaction at seeing his beneficent hopes for ever destroyed. But chagrin did not numb his industry or his wide interests. Condorcet went to visit him some months after his fall. He describes Turgot as reading Ariosto, as making experiments in physics, and as having forgotten all that had pa.s.sed within the last two years, save when the sight of evils that he would have mitigated or removed, happened to remind him of it. He occupied himself busily with chemistry and optics, with astronomy and mechanics, and above all with meteorology, which was a new science in those days, and the value of which to the study of the conditions of human health, of the productions of the earth, of navigation, excited his most ardent antic.i.p.ations. Turgot also was so moved by the necessity for a new synthesis of life and knowledge as to frame a plan for a great work "on the human soul, the order of the universe, the Supreme Being, the principles of societies, the rights of men, political const.i.tutions, legislation, administration, physical education, the means of perfecting the human race relatively to the progressive advance and employment of their forces, to the happiness of which they are susceptible, to the extent of the knowledge to which they may attain, to the certainty, clearness, and simplicity of the principles of conduct, to the purity of the feelings that spring up in men"s souls." While his mind was moving through these immense s.p.a.ces of thought, he did not forget the things of the hour. He invented a machine for serving ship"s cables. He wrote a plea for allowing Captain Cook"s vessel to remain unmolested during the American war. With Adam Smith, with Dr. Price, with Franklin, with Hume, he kept up a grave and worthy correspondence. Of his own countrymen, Condorcet was his most faithful friend and disciple, and it is much to Condorcet"s credit that this was so, for Turgot never gave way to the pa.s.sionate impulses of the philosophic school against what Voltaire called the Infamous, that is to say, against the Church, her doctrines, her morality, her history.
We have already said that the keyword to Turgot"s political aims and social theory was not Pity nor Benevolence, but Justice. It was Justice also, not temporary Prejudice nor Pa.s.sion, that guided his judgment through the heated issues of the time. This justice and exact reasonableness it was impossible to surprise or throw off its guard. His sublime intellectual probity never suffered itself to be tempted. He protested against the doctrines of Helvetius"s book, _de l"Esprit_, and of D"Holbach"s _Systeme de la Nature_, at a moment when some of his best friends were enthusiastic in admiration, for no better reason than that the doctrines of the two books were hateful to the ecclesiastics and destructive of the teaching of the Church. In the course of a discussion, Condorcet had maintained that in general scrupulous persons are not fit for great things: a Christian, he said, will waste in subduing the darts of the flesh time that he might have employed upon things that would have been useful to humanity; he will never venture to rise against tyrants, for fear of having formed a hasty judgment, and so forth in other cases. "No virtue," replies Turgot, "in whatever sense you take the word, can dispense with justice; and I think no better of the people who do your _great things_ at the cost of justice, than I do of poets who fancy that they can produce great wonders of imagination without order and regularity. I know that excessive precision tends to deaden the fire alike of action and of composition; but there is a medium in everything. There has never been any question in our controversy of a capuchin wasting his time in quenching the darts of the flesh, though, by the way, in the whole sum of time wasted, the term expressing the time lost in satisfying the appet.i.tes of the flesh would probably be found to be decidedly the greater of the two." This parenthesis is one of a hundred ill.u.s.trations of Turgot"s habitual refusal to be carried out of the narrow path of exact rationality, or to take for granted a single word of the common form of the dialect even of his best friends and closest a.s.sociates. And the readiness with which men fall into common form, the levity with which they settle the most complex and difficult issues, stirred in Turgot what Michelet calls _ferocite_, and Mr. Matthew Arnold calls _soeva indignatio_. "Turgot was filled with an astonished, awful, oppressive sense of the _immoral thoughtlessness_ of men; of the heedless, hazardous way in which they deal with things of the greatest moment to them; of the immense, incalculable misery which is due to this cause" (_M. Arnold_).
Turgot died on the 20th of March 1781, leaving to posterity the memory of a character which was more perfect and imposing than his performances. Condorcet saw in this harmonious union and fine balance of qualities the secret of his unpopularity. "Envy," he says, "seems more closely to attend a character that approaches perfection, than one that, while astonishing men by its greatness, yet by exhibiting a mixture of defects and vices, offers a consolation that envy seeks."