With regard to the milice, he proposed wide changes. But since the Government would not rouse itself to act on the proposals, he took advantage of its self-indulgent indifference and permitted evasions of the law; when an unlucky creature drew a black ticket in the conscription in Limoges, the new Intendant permitted him to find a substitute or to pay a fee. He also built barracks, which removed the necessity for quartering the soldiers on the poor.
The fearful trammels which ‘crippled trade and industry and doomed labour to sterility,’ he in part removed. He made new roads; he became President of the first Agricultural Society in the district; he founded a veterinary college. In the teeth of strong opposition he promoted the cultivation of the potato; and by having it served daily at his own table proved to the ignorance of the peasants that it was at least safe for human food. He also introduced the growth of clover, and entirely suppressed a worrying little tax on cattle. He first brought to Limoges a properly qualified midwife, who taught her business to other women. This was the beginning of the Hospice de la Maternité. During Turgot’s Intendancy the china clay, of which the famous Limoges pottery was afterwards made, was discovered.
Besides these public acts, he was engaged in hundreds of small individual charities. Among others, he educated at his own expense a youth whose father had been entirely ruined by taxation and famine. The youth was Vergniaud, afterwards the stirring orator of the Revolution.
In his home-life Turgot remained most frugal and laborious, treating his servants with a benevolence then accounted contemptible, and working out his quiet schemes with an infinite patience and thoroughness. When he was offered the richer Intendancy of Lyons, he would not take it. Here, as he said of himself, though he was ‘the compulsory instrument of great evil,’ he was doing a little good. Only a little, it might be. But if every man did the little he could—what a different world!
In 1765, he paid a visit to Paris, and in the Calas case, made famous by Voltaire, spoke on the side of tolerance with a vehemence unusual to him. Morellet, d’Alembert, and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse were still his friends. Condorcet was in his closest intimacy, and destined hereafter to write his Life—‘one of the wisest and noblest of lives,’ says John Stuart Mill, ‘delineated by one of the noblest and wisest of men.’
In Paris, he met Adam Smith, the political economist. As a result of their acquaintance Turgot produced in the next year his ‘Reflections on the Reformation and Distribution of Wealth,’ fertile in conception, arid in style, and anticipating many of the ideas familiar to English readers through Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations.’
But the insistent claims of Limoges on his time and pity narrowed his hours for study, even for the study that would serve it well. In 1767 he cleared the province of wolves, by a system analogous to that by which Edgar rid Wales of the same pest.
Then, in 1770, Limoges and its Intendant began their fight with want. When Turgot came to the province, the wretched place was a million francs in arrears for its taxes. Some he had certainly lessened. The work he had started was just beginning to bear its first little harvest of good, when there came the withering blast of the two years’ famine. Its horrors were unthinkable. Turgot wrote to Terrai, the Controller-General, that it was impossible to extort the taxes and the arrears without ruin—ay, and with ruin—to the taxed. The people could not only not pay what was demanded of them, but they had nothing to sell for the barren necessities of their own existence. God knows they had learnt by long and bitter practice to subsist on little enough! But now they must surely sit down and die.
Strong and calm, Turgot rose up again. From the Parliament at Bordeaux he obtained permission to levy a tax on the rich in aid of the sufferers. He himself opened workshops in which he gave work, and paid for it, not in coin, which would certainly be spent at the nearest cabaret, but in leather tickets which could be exchanged for food at the cheap provision shops, also of his own institution.
Far beyond his age in every practical scheme for the benefit of mankind, he was beyond our own age in that he clearly perceived that the free soup-kitchen, and all the sentimental philanthropy which gives money in lieu of work, instead of paying money for work, must be demoralising, and in the long run create more misery than it relieves. ‘Such distributions,’ said he, ‘have the effect of accustoming the people to mendicity.’ Even through a famine he sent to prison every beggar he could lay hands on. Then, again far beyond his age, he induced the ladies of the district to teach the poor girls needlework; and so to give them ‘the best and most useful kinds of alms—the means to earn.’ The fight was long and hard. But it had its reward. The people came to love him who had helped them to help themselves; who had given them, not the bitter bread and scornful dole of charity, but the power to earn a livelihood and their first taste of self-respect.