tially manufacturing, of the people of France, were exposed to persecutions of the most revolting kind-persecutions resulting in the death of at least half a million of persons; while at its close, at least an equal number abandoned the land of their nativity — carrying with them, into England, Holland, and Germany, such portions of their property as had escaped the general wreck; and carrying with them, too, the secrets of their various departments of manufacture, their intelligence, and the excellent habits by which they had been at home so much distinguished. It was a repetition, though on a smaller scale, of the policy of Ferdinand and Isabella, and their successors, in expelling the Moors from Spain; and it was followed by the same effects precisely — the ruin of agriculture. When to this we add the fact, that Louis was almost constantly engaged in wars with the most powerful of the European states wars demanding enormous sacrifices, and closing, invariably, with treaties* whose provisions required, in favor of his opponents, the abandonment of the protection to manufactures that Colbert had established it is no matter of surprise, that the condition of the people, at his death, should have been miserable to a degree of which we can now form scarcely a conception; nor, that the reign of his successor should have been distinguished by feebleness in the motion of society-by an almost total absence of commerce- - by extreme reduction in the price of food-by inability to find the means with which to purchase it— and by a universal depression of the agricultural interest, consequent upon the almost entire annihilation of the manufacturing one.†

§ 5. A century after Colbert, we find Turgot - animated by the same views-laboring to free the land and labor of the country from the thousand monopolies that still remained, to retard the growth of commerce. The period during which he occupied the post of Comptroller General of the Finances, exhibits a constant series of edicts looking to the abolition of exclusive privi

Nimeguen, in 1679; Ryswick, 1697; and Utrecht, in 1713—all of which contained provisions setting aside Colbert's tariff of 1667; and one of which went so far as to limit the power of the king to grant protection to his subjects. No stronger proof is furnished in history of the close connection between weakness and centralization than is to be found in the records of the reign of Louis XIV.

See Vol. I., p. 254, for the condition of the people under Louis XV.

leges, and to the emancipation of the laborer from the control of corporations composed of men who "lived and moved and had their being," in virtue of the right, hitherto secured to them by law, of standing between those who required to consume, and those who labored to produce. His career was short, but had it been prolonged, he would probably have realized his prediction to the king, that at the end of ten years the nation would not be recognised as being the same as that which he had found when entering upon the duties of his office.

Those years were not, however, allowed to him. His administration lasted three years only, and with its close disappeared all hope of peaceful solution of the financial difficulties of the government, or peaceful removal of the burdens under which the people suffered. Theoretically, Turgot was opposed to the idea of granting protection to the farmer in the effort to bring the consumer to his side; but he never attempted to interfere, in that direction, with the system he had found established. That work was left for his incapable successors, by whom was negotiated, in 1786, a treaty with England, by which French manufactures were sacrificed, and without even the appearance of advantages obtained for agriculture. Forthwith, the towns and cities of France were inundated with English merchandise; and before the treaty was two years old, the varied industry that had been built up with so much care had almost ceased to exist. Workmen were everywhere discharged and everywhere starving for want of a market. in which to sell their labor; while agriculture suffered, because the men who could not sell their labor could buy no food. Commerce had perished under the heavy blows administered by trade. The distress was universal - paralyzing the movement of the government, and forcing it to the adoption of the initial measure of the Revolution-the calling together of the Notables in 1788.

All that Turgot, but a few years earlier, had claimed - but vainly claimed-in behalf of the people, was taken by them, when revolution swept away the privileges of trading and religious corporations; when the necessities of the state led to the confiscation of the property of the nobility and the church; and when peer and peasant were declared equal before the law. Thenceforth, commerce was in a great degree freed from the restrictions by VOL. II. - 4

Thenceforth, the Thenceforth, the soil

which her course had been before impeded. right to labor ceased to be a privilege. became the subject of purchase and of sale; and thenceforth, the laborer could bestow his labor on a piece of land, confident that whatever might be the value given to it, that value would enure to the benefit of his wife, his children, and himself. Decentralization had thus triumphed over centralization; but the measures to which were due the effects above described, were accompanied by the greatly centralizing ones of the abolition of all the provincial governments, the annihilation of the ancient boundaries, and the division of the whole territory into departments - all tending, necessarily, towards diminution in the feeling of local pride which so much contributes to the activity of social life. Provision was being made for future diminution of social centralization, but political centralization was at once, and largely, increased; and hence it is, that France has not, as yet, been enabled to obtain a stable government.

Amid this war of elements, the system of Colbert, so far as it looked to the establishment of direct intercourse between producers and consumers, and to the emancipation of commerce from the dominion of trade, stood unharmed-the retrograde step of those who negotiated the treaty of 1786 being now retraced, and protection being re-established. The war that followed-producing a necessity for looking homeward for supplies of cloth and of iron -tended in the same direction. Such, too, was the tendency of the Continental System of Napoleon; and therefore was it, that the return of peace found the people and the government of France prepared to act together in carrying out, and even in strengthening, the measures of resistance to trading centralization commenced, a century and a half before, by the illustrious minister of Louis XIV. - measures looking to the emancipation of the farmer from the oppressive tax of transportation.

How far they have tended to the advancement of agriculture, will be seen by the following figures-derived from the Statistique de l'Agriculture de la France-compiled by M. de Jonnès from official documents, and representing the increase in the money value of the product of agricultural labor since the beginning of the last century :—

The first of these, was that which followed the exhaustion of the resources of the kingdom by the continued succession of the wars of Louis XIV.-a period in which, says M. Blanqui, "commerce had almost ceased to exist; and manufactures, decimated by the proscription of the Protestants, seemed condemned to lose all the conquests for which they had been indebted to the genius of Colbert."*

The second was that during which the proscriptive ideas which had dictated the repeal of the Edict of Nantes, continued to be maintained; that during which the clergy retained for themselves the literary censorship; that during which the vendors of prohibited books were branded and sent to the galleys; and that in which Turgot vainly endeavored to carry into more full effect the ideas of Colbert, in reference to the emancipation of the internal commerce of the kingdom from the almost innumerable restraints which forbade the circulation of labor and its products.†

* See Vol. I., p. 254.

Fettered and oppressed in every way as France was under her despotic kings, the spirit of invention and enterprise could never rise to those high conceptions which, of late years, have brought England and America to the summit of prosperity. Manufacturers, placed under the severe control of men who purchased their offices from government, and who, therefore, exercised them with rapacity, could not hazard any improvement without infringing the established regulations, and running the risk of having their goods destroyed, burnt, or confiscated. In every trade, official regulations prescribed to workmen the methods of working, and forbade deviation from them, under pain of the most severe punishments. Ridiculous to say, the framer of these statutes fancied he understood better how to sort and prepare wool, silk, or cotton, to spin threads, to twist and throw them, than workmen brought up to the trade, and whose livelihood depended on their talent.

**To insure a compliance with such absurd regulations, inquisitorial measures were resorted to; the residences of manufacturers were entered by force; their establishments searched and explored, and their modes of working inquired into. Thus their most secret methods were often discovered, and pirated by fraudulent competitors.

The worthy Roland de la Platiere, who was a minister during some part of the French Revolution, and put an end to his life in the Reign of Terror, gives a deplorable account of the numerous acts of oppression he had wit nessed. I have seen,' says he, eighty, ninety, a hundred pieces of cotton or woollen stuffs cut up and completely destroyed. I have witnessed similar

The third, was a period of war, accompanied by an unceasing demand for men and money. - and closing with two occupations of the soil of France by the assembled armies of Europe; and yet, so beneficial were the effects of the removal of even a portion scenes every week for a number of years. I have seen manufactured goods confiscated; heavy fines laid on the manufacturers; some pieces of fabric were burnt in public places, and at the hours of market; others were fixed to the pillory, with the name of the manufacturer inscribed upon them, and he himself was threatened with the pillory in case of a second offence. All this was done under my eyes at Rouen, in conformity with existing regulations or ministerial orders. What crime deserved so cruel a punishment? Some defects in the materials employed, or in the texture of the fabrics, or even in some of the threads of the warp!

I have frequently seen,' continues Roland, manufacturers visited by a band of satellites, who put all in confusion in their establishments, spread terror in their families, cut the stuff from the frames, tore off the warp from the looms, and carried them away as proofs of infringement; the manufacturers were summoned, tried, and condemned; their goods confiscated; copies of their judgment of confiscation posted up in every public place; future reputation, credit, all was lost and destroyed. And for what offence? Because they had made of worsted a kind of cloth called shag, such as the English used to manufacture, and even sell in France, while the French regulations stated that that kind of cloth should be made with mohair.

"I have seen other manufacturers treated in the same way, because they had made camlets of a particular width, used in England and Germany, for which there was a great demand from Spain, Portugal, and other countries, and from several parts of France, while the French regulations prescribed other widths for camlets.'

"There was no free town where mechanical invention could find a refuge from the tyranny of the monopolists no trade but what was clearly and explicitly described by the statutes could be exercised-none but what was included in the privileges of some corporation.

"No one could improve on a method, or deviate from the prescribed rules for manufacturing stuffs of cotton, worsted, or silk, without running the risk of being heavily fined, having his frames destroyed, and his manufactured goods burnt in the public place by the hands of the executioner.

66

Many inventors were forbidden to reduce their inventions into practice, when their application for letters-patent was not supported by powerful recommendations, or when they were unable to bid a high price for the goodwill of the clerks of office.

"Some merchants of Nantes and Rennes wished to form, on a new plan, manufactories of wool, silk, and cotton goods. They possessed new preparations for fixing the colors. As soon as the establishment was fitted up, the corporation of serge-makers contested their right of making woollen stuffs, and the corporation of dyers claimed the privilege of dyeing for them. Law proceedings, carried on for several years, absorbed the capital raised for the purpose of forming a useful establishment, and when at last a favorable decision was obtained, all the resources of the manufacturers were exhausted: thus, the serge-makers and dyers succeeded in ruining dangerous competitors!

"The art of snarling and varnishing sheet-iron was found out in France in 1761; but to carry it into execution, it was necessary to employ workmen and use tools belonging to several trades; the inventor, not rich enough to pay the fees of admission into the corporations to which those trades belonged, went abroad and formed an establishment in a foreign country.”PUSSIGNA: French Law of Patents.