 In the 1770s Condorcet first showed himself to be a talented and passionate polemicist, aiming to turn public administration to the public good, while shrewdly appreciating how much power and position weighed in achieving the latter. As he wrote in an early letter to Turgot, who was then a royal official at Limoges, “To do good, one must have as much power as goodwill” (cited in Baker 1976, x). Upon Turgot’s ascension to head of the financial administration of the monarchy as Controller-General [in effect, Minister of Finance], Condorcet freely offered his services in the war of opinion. He defended Turgot’s introduction of free trade in grain, the abolition of guilds and corporations, and the suppression of the corvée: the forced labor system or taxation in kind associated with seignurial rights and royal privilege. He pressed for reform of the country’s system of weights and measures and participated in hydrodynamic experiments to determine the engineering principles of canal construction. Like Turgot’s other short-lived reforms, Condorcet also embraced the latter’s unsuccessful proposal to reform the system of political representation in France by introducing a hierarchy of assemblies from the local to the national  level.[9]  The minister’s abrupt fall from power in May 1776 left him in deep despair: “this event has changed the whole of nature for me”, he wrote to Voltaire from Ribemont. “ I no longer take the same pleasure in this beautiful countryside where he would have brought forth happiness… How far we are fallen, my dear and illustrious master, and from such height” (cited in Baker 1976, xii).