Your Majesty will have quite a new people, and the first of peoples." A profound error, which was that of the whole Revolution, and the consequences of which would have been immediately fatal; if the powerful instinct of conservatism and of natural respect for the past had not maintained between the regimen which was crumbling away and the new fabric connections more powerful and more numerous than their friends as well as their enemies were aware of.
Two fundamental principles regulated the financial system of M.Turgot, economy in expenditure and freedom in trade; everywhere he ferreted out abuses, abolishing useless offices and payments, exacting from the entire administration that strict probity of which he set the example.

Louis XVI.

supported him conscientiously at that time in all his reforms; the public made fun of it.

"The king," it was said, "when he considers himself an abuse, will be one no longer." At the same time, a decree of September 13, 1774, re-established at home that freedom of trade in grain which had been suspended by Abbe Terray, and the edict of April, 1776, founded freedom of trade in wine.

"It is by trade alone, and by free trade, that the inequality of harvests can be corrected," said the minister in the preamble of his decree.