beside him one of the most able and vigorous administrators who have ever
lived--Colbert. He had the merit--not a small one in that age--of letting
this great minister invent and carry out the most daring and beneficial
measures of reform, of which he assumed all the credit to himself. The
first step was a vigorous attack on the gang of financial plunderers,
who, with Fouquet at their head, simply embezzled the bulk of the state
revenues. The money-lenders not only obtained the most usurious interest
for their loans, but actually held in mortgage the most productive sources
of the national taxation: and, not content with that, they bought up, at 10
per cent. of their nominal value, an enormous amount of discredited bills,
issued by the government in the time of the Fronde, which they forced the
treasury to pay off at par; and this was done with the very money they had
just before advanced to the government.

Such barefaced plunder could not be endured, and Colbert was the last man
to endure it. He not only repressed peculation, but introduced a number of
practical improvements in the distribution, and especially in the mode of
levying the taxes. So imperfect were the arrangements connected with the
latter that it was estimated that of eighty-four millions paid by the
people, only thirty-two millions entered into the coffers of the state. The
almost instantaneous effects of Colbert's measures--the yawning deficit
was changed into a surplus of forty-five millions in less than two
years--showed how gross and flagrant had been the malversation preceding.

Far more difficult, and far nobler in the order of constructive
statesmanship, were his vast schemes to endow France with manufactures,
with a commercial and belligerent navy, with colonies, besides his manifold
reforms in the internal administration--tariffs and customs between
neighboring provinces of France; the great work of the Languedoc canal; in
fact, in every part and province of government. His success was various,