[1]. I mean by usury interest levied upon unproductive loans; I mean by true profit the share of produce legitimately claimed by the lender of funds which have been put to productive use.
France, so much larger in area and population and inheriting so superior a tradition of magnitude, had all but failed. With citizens double the English in number, and with an arable soil in proportion, the French Crown could only with the utmost difficulty attract to the exchequer a sum of barely twelve—at the most, and counting every expedient, thirteen—million pounds from the national income. Briefly, England could support with ease a larger debt than could this neighbouring nation twice her size; England could spend with prodigality as much as that nation was compelled to spend with parsimony; and England could raise without effort a revenue already equal, soon to be superior, to that which the rival government could but barely extract from its subjects.
Nor does this comparison exhaust the contrast between financial health and disease upon either side of the Channel. England thus prosperous was increasingly at ease. France thus exhausted was increasingly embarrassed. Deficit followed deficit; that expenditure should exceed revenue had become a normal annual incident publicly discounted, nay, a sort of fixed ratio appeared between what should be and what was the income of the government, and the expenditure exceeded revenue with a solemn regularity much in the proportion of forty-four to thirty-seven. In the American War, which either nation was approaching, England, defeated, was to incur 170 million of debt and yet to emerge, a few years after the defeat, financially stronger than ever in the Wars of the Revolution. France, victorious, was to incur but a third of that liability, and yet in the Revolution France was compelled to declare herself insolvent.
Why did so startling a contrast appear? To us to-day it is almost inconceivable. The French are now somewhat less in population than the English, they pretend to no serious empire beyond the Mediterranean, yet they raise for national purposes a larger revenue, and they raise it with far greater facility; they support a debt double our own, without troubling the least gullible and most thrifty investing public in Europe. Considerable additions to their total liability hardly affect their credit, when ours falls by a fifth of its index upon the issue of 150 millions. The value of their agricultural land rises rapidly as does that of their urban; they find public money for enterprises which we starve or neglect. Their universities, though dependent on public funds, abound; their national church, deprived of official assistance, flourishes on but a fraction of their surplus wealth; their historical buildings are kept up in magnificence upon public funds. It is difficult, I say, for an Englishman to try to appreciate the overwhelming economic advantage which, under George III., England enjoyed over the Bourbons, who were her rivals; because in the course of a century, and especially of the present generation, the tables have been turned. It is England now that is in doubt as to her financial position and her fiscal methods. It is in England that money is lacking for necessary social reforms. It is English credit which fluctuates with violence, and English direct taxation which is strained to breaking-point.
In the time of which I write all these perils and disadvantages attached to France and to France alone. The France which England faced in the great struggle was a France labouring in anxiety for money, and the cause of that increasing pressure is apparent to History: the method of public economics had failed in France then as perhaps it is now failing here in England.
Men inherit, and of necessity every generation is shut in with custom. Who would in England to-day dream of taxing the mass of Englishmen—or rather, of taxing them directly and to their own knowledge? The very idea is laughable! There may be coming into a coal-miner’s cottage in Durham twice the income of a clerk, but who would dare send in an assessment or talk of a shilling in the pound? The clerk must pay; the miner go free—for such is the tradition of the Fisc. Who would rate the houses of the wealthiest class as the houses of the middle class are rated? It would seem madness. So, but in a more acute fashion, did the financial system of France suffer at the end of the eighteenth century. Its data, its conventions were those of an older state of society long departed. It presupposed the manor, and the manor was dead; it presupposed the self-contained country-side at a moment when the various provinces of the whole State had long been intimately bound together by commerce and when strong international links of exchange had already begun to arise. The evil was a fiscal system out of touch with the realities of the time. The remedy was a violent and rapid remodelling of that system. All could perceive the evil, many the remedy; but custom and the collective force of private avarice in the individual minds checked, and checked sharply, with the blind control of a natural force, all reform that attempted to act and to do. The attempt at reform was baulked, as a natural force baulks human purpose, by a million atomic actions. The million separate interests refused it.
For such an attempt, for such audacity, Turgot with his austere, convinced, and isolated mind was better suited than any other man; yet even he in a very few months had refused to level the hard-grained social knots which blunted every tool of the reformer who would level the inequalities of the State. Within two years his attempt had failed and he had resigned—but while the resistance of the tax-payer counted for much in his resignation, the increasing ill-balance of his young Queen counted for more.
During the first part of his administration of finance Marie Antoinette’s ill-balance was not so marked as to give promise of what was to come. No folly, no conspicuous extravagance marred the first weeks of her reign—her inchoate and girlish irruptions into the Council were alone of ill-omen; but as the new Court settled down into its stride, accumulated its first traditions and began to take on a character of its own, her aspect in the public eye was daily fixed with greater clearness, and the impression so conveyed to a nation already in rapid transition was a further element of irritation and confusion.
For the permanently present threat of poverty and embarrassment, which with every year corroded more and more deeply the public service and rendered less and less stable the general equilibrium of the State, lent to the habits the Queen was about to form, and still more to the public exaggeration of those habits, a gravity they could never otherwise have assumed. It was part of her lot that she could not, from the very nature of her position, understand the relationship between her petty extravagances and the popular ill-ease.
She was right. Her extravagance, such as it was, came slowly—nay, though that extravagance was a proof of excess in her character, it was never really excessive in amount; the sums we mention when we speak of it are trifling when we compare them with the financial debauchery of our own age. Why, that whole annual increase in her allowance which Turgot has been blamed for making would not have paid for one night’s riot in the house of some one of our London Jews. Even when her expenses did exceed the limit she should have set upon them; even when, as month followed month, the love of jewellery and the distraction of cards involved her in private debt, the sums so wasted in a whole year were not what some of our moderns have scattered in a few days. Her total debts after two years were less than £20,000! Moreover, careless and wasteful as the girl was for those well-ordered times, her excesses never bore an appreciable proportion to the scale of the public embarrassment. Her difficulties were never so great but that the sale of a farm or two could meet them. Had the Bourbon Crown enjoyed private as well as a public revenue, her lack of economy and of order would perhaps never have been heard of.