without terror."--Resume de l'Histoire du Commerce, p. 156.] Man cannot
struggle at once against human oppression and the destructive forces of
inorganic nature. "When both are combined against him, he succumbs after
a shorter or longer struggle, and the fields he has won from the
primeval wood relapse into their original state of wild and luxuriant,
but unprofitable forest growth, or fall into that of a dry and barren
wilderness. The abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, which, in the time of
Charlemagne, had possessed a million of acres, was, down to the
Revolution, still so wealthy, that the personal income of the abbot was
300,000 livres. Theabbey of Saint-Denis was nearly as rich as that of
Saint-Germain-des-Pres.--Lavergne, Economie Rurale de la France, p. 104.

Paul Louis Courier quotes from La Bruyere the following striking picture
of the condition of the French peasantry in his time: "One sees certain
dark, livid, naked, sunburnt, wild animals, male and female, scattered
over the country and attached to the soil, which they root and turn over
with indomitable perseverance. They have, as it were, an articulate
voice, and when they rise to their feet, they show a human face. They
are, in fact, men; they creep at night into dens, where they live on
black bread, water, and roots. They spare other men the labor of
ploughing, Bowing, and harvesting, and therefore deserve some small
share of the bread they have grown." "These are his own words," adds
Courier, "and he is speaking of the fortunate peasants, of those who had
work and bread, and they were then the few."--Petition a la Chambre des
Deputes pour les Villageois l'en empeche ce danser.

Arthur Young, who travelled in France from 1787 to 1789, gives, in the
twenty-first chapter of his Travels, a frightful account of the burdens
of the rural population even at that late period. Besides the regular
governmental taxes, and a multitude of heavy fines imposed for trifling