in such a way as to protect the soil by fixing on the soil, through
property and its enjoyment, a troop of brave men under the leadership
of a brave chieftain. The danger having passed away the structure
became dilapidated. For a pecuniary compensation the seigniors allowed
the economical and tenacious peasant to pick off it a good many
stones. Through constraint they suffered the king to appropriate to
himself the public portion. The primitive foundation remains, property
as organized in ancient times, the fettered or exhausted land
supporting a social conformation that has melted away, in short, an
order of privileges and of thralldom of which the cause and the
purpose have disappeared. [30]

V. They may be justified by local and general services.

All this does not suffice to render this order detrimental or even
useless. In reality, the local chief who no longer performs his
ancient service may perform a new one in exchange for it. Instituted
for war when life was militant, he may serve in quiet times when the
régime is pacific, while the advantage to the nation is great in which
this transformation is accomplished; for, retaining its chiefs, it is
relieved of the uncertain and perilous operation which consists in
creating others. There is nothing more difficult to establish than a
government, that is to say, a stable government: this involves the
command of some and the obedience of all, which is against nature.
That a man in his study, often a feeble old person, should dispose of
the lives and property of twenty or thirty million men, most of whom
he has never seen; that he should order them to pay away a tenth or a
fifth of their income and they should do it; that he should order them
to go and slaughter or be slaughtered and that they should go; that
they should thus continue for ten years, twenty years, through every