a loom or a bowsprit, than of any other object the most remote from their habits and pursuits.”  Through tradition, fashion and deliberation, they are, and wish only to be, people of society; their sole concern is to talk and to hunt.  Never have the leaders of men so unlearned the art of leading men; the art which consists of marching along the same pathway with them, but at the head, and directing their labor by sharing in it. — Our Englishman, an eye-witness and competent, again writes:  “Thus it is whenever you stumble on a grand seignior, even one that was worth millions, you are sure to find his property desert.  Those of the Duc de Bouillon and of the Prince de Soubise are two of the greatest properties in France; and all the signs I have yet seen of their greatness are heaths, moors, deserts, and brackens.  Go to their residence, wherever it may be, and you would probably find them in the midst of a forest very well peopled with deer, wild boars and wolves.”  “The great proprietors,” says another contemporary,[40] “attracted to and kept in our cities by luxurious enjoyments know nothing of their estates,” save “of their agents whom they harass for the support of a ruinous ostentation.  How can ameliorations be looked for from those who even refuse to keep things up and make indispensable repairs?” A sure proof that their absence is the cause of the evil is found in the visible difference between the domain worked under absent abbé-commendatory and a domain superintended by monks living on the spot “The intelligent traveler recognizes it” at first sight by the state of cultivation.  “If he finds fields well enclosed by ditches, carefully planted, and covered with rich crops, these fields, he says to himself; belong to the monks.  Almost always, alongside of these fertile plains, is an area of ground badly tilled and almost barren, presenting a painful contrast; and yet the soil is the same, being two portions of the same domain; he sees that the latter is the portion of the abbé-commendatory.”  “The abbatial manse.” said Lefranc de Pompignan, “frequently looks like the property of a spendthrift; the monastic manse is like a patrimony whereon nothing is neglected for its amelioration,” to such an extent that " the two-thirds " which the abbé enjoys bring him less than the third reserved by his monks. — The ruin or impoverishment of agriculture is, again, one of the effects of absenteeism.  There was, perhaps, one-third of the soil in France, which, deserted as in Ireland, was as badly tilled, as little productive as in Ireland in the hands of the rich absentees, the English bishops, deans and nobles.