If it prevents them from doing so, let it make them compensation; in default of the thing promised to them, it owes them the value of it.

Such is the law in cases of expropriation for public utility; in 1834, for instance, the English, for the legal abolition of slavery, paid to their planters the sum of L20,000,000.

--But that is not sufficient: when, in the suppression of feudal rights, the legislator's thoughts are taken up with the creditors, he has only half performed his task; there are two sides to the question, and he must likewise think of the debtors.

If he is not merely a lover of abstractions and of fine phrases, if that which interests him is men and not words, if he is bent upon the effective enfranchisement of the cultivator of the soil, he will not rest content with proclaiming a principle, with permitting the redemption of rents, with fixing the rate of redemption, and, in case of dispute, with sending parties before the tribunals.

He will reflect that the peasantry, jointly responsible for the same debt will find difficulty in agreeing among themselves; that they are afraid of litigation; that, being ignorant, they will not know how to set about it; that, being poor, they will be unable to pay; and that, under the weight of discord, distrust, indigence, and inertia, the new law will remain a dead letter, and only exasperate their cupidity or kindle their resentment.