1788;"--above a year after Mirabeau had left.] while he sat penning
those robust Essays on the Duty of LEAVE-ALONE.

"To form an idea of the general subversion," says the King, in
regard to 1763, "and how great were the desolation and
discouragement, you must represent to yourself Countries entirely
ravaged, the very traces of the old habitations hardly
discoverable; Towns, some ruined from top to bottom, others half
destroyed by fire;--13,000 Houses, of which the very vestiges were
gone. No field in seed; no grain for the food of the inhabitants;
60,000 horses needed, if there was to be ploughing carried on:
in the Provinces generally Half a Million Population (500,000) less
than in 1756,--that is to say, upon only Four Millions and a Half,
the ninth man was wanting. Noble and Peasant had been pillaged,
ransomed, foraged, eaten out by so many different Armies;
nothing now left them but life and miserable rags.

"There was no credit, by trading people, even for the daily
necessaries of life." And furthermore, what we were not prepared
for, "No police in the Towns: to habits of equity and order had
succeeded a vile greed of gain and an anarchic disorder.
The Colleges of Justice and of Finance had, by these frequent
invasions of so many enemies, been reduced to inaction:" no Judge,
in many places not even a Tax-gatherer: the silence of the Laws had
produced in the people a taste for license; boundless appetite for
gain was their main rule of action: the noble, the merchant, the
farmer, the laborer, raising emulously each the price of his
commodity, seemed to endeavor only for their mutual ruin.
Such, when the War ended, was the fatal spectacle over these
Provinces, which had once been so flourishing: however pathetic the