In anticipation of this disorder the legislator will come to their assistance; he will interpose commissions of arbitration between them and the lord of the manor; he will substitute a scale of annuities for a full and immediate redemption; he will lend them the capital which they cannot borrow elsewhere; he will establish a bank, rights, and a mode of procedure,--in short, as in Savoy in 1771, in England in 1845,[2219] and in Russia in 1861, he will relieve the poor without despoiling the rich; he will establish liberty without violating the rights of property; he will conciliate interests and classes; he will not let loose a brutal peasant revolt (Jacquerie) to enforce unjust confiscation; and he will terminate the social conflict not with strife but with peace.
It is just the reverse in 1789 In conformity with the doctrine of the social contract, the principle is set up that every man is born free, and that his freedom has always been inalienable.

If he formerly submitted to slavery or to serfdom, it was owing to his having had a knife at his throat; a contract of this sort is essentially null and void.

So much the worse for those who have the benefit of it at the present day; they are holders of stolen property, and must restore it to the legitimate owners.

Let no one object that this property was acquired for cash down, and in good faith; they ought to have known beforehand that man and his liberty are not commercial matters, and that unjust acquisitions rightly perish in their hands.[2220] Nobody dreams that the State which was a party to this transaction is the responsible guarantor.

Only one scruple affects the Assembly; its jurists and Merlin, its reporter, are obliged to yield to proof; they know that in current practice, and by innumerable ancient and modern titles, the noble in many cases is nothing but an ordinary lessor, and that if, in those cases, he collects his dues, it is simply in his capacity as a private person, by virtue of a mutual contract, because he has given a perpetual lease of a certain portion of his land; and he has given it only in consideration of an annual payment in money or produce, or services, together with another contingent claim which the farmer pays in case of the transmission of the lease.