his ministers to restore the balance of authority and redress evils.

The reformers had to meet two opposed forces. First, the vested interests of the nobility and churchmen, and of the very numerous officials who ruled the country and were opposed to changes which lessened their wealth and influence. Though Louis was served at the outset by excellent ministers, their work was negatived by the opposition of a bureaucracy which, like the Whig junta which George III. overthrew, were ready to sacrifice all the interests of their country to the preservation of their political power and influence. Turgot made tremendous efforts at reform, abolishing wasteful and evil institutions, and working for freedom of trade and the widening of the basis of political power. In January, 1776, he proposed six edicts, dealing with abuses, some of which seem small things, but all of them tending to freedom. Colbert had introduced and nursed manufactures. But he regulated minutely the details of production and checked improvement and invention. Every department of trade came to be governed by the trade unions called guilds, close corporations of a few families. The Bourse was such a corporation of aristocrats. Guilds multiplied and guild division became more minute. Turgot abolished the guilds, closed the Caisse d'escompte of Poissy, abolished the royal Corvée, suppressed the market regulations, and the offices of ports, quays, halls and markets which impeded the provisioning of Paris, and suppressed the purchase in common of tallow by the chandlers. He established free trade in corn. But these reforms, slight as they were, offended a crowd of highly-placed interests, and required a bed of justice to obtain their registry in the Parlement, which, in opposition to the views of his ministers, Louis had restored. In May, 1776, Turgot was obliged to resign, and affairs reverted to the old conditions.

The opposition of the horde of officials, who swarmed over France and lived on the country, not only made reform almost impossible but ate up a great part of the revenue collected in waste of collection. There was always a great arrear of money due to the Treasury, great spending of future revenue not collected, and great speculation in it, whether collected or not. As a matter of fact, the Treasury had been bankrupt ever

since the days of Louis XIV.; there was a perpetual deficit and a mountain of unpaid loans.

At the accession of Louis XVI. the State had borrowed 1,740 millions of livres, and dragged behind this a floating debt of 600 millions. There was no means under existing conditions of liquidating these debts. Turgot made economic reforms, but in spite of these, according to Taine, the profuse and insane private expenditure of the king and his reckless gifts left him, in 1778, with a debt of nearly 800,000 livres to his wine merchant and nearly three and a half millions to his purveyor. Sybel estimates court expenditure as forty millions, not counting royal hunts and journeys, salaries of officers and maintenance of palaces; war office, 39 millions to administration, 44 millions pay and commissariat of troops and 46 millions for salaries of officers; about 100 millions for money orders of the king himself, for presents to various officials, etc., repayment of foreign loans, interest and discount to Treasury officials, remission of taxes, etc.; bridges and roads, 4 millions; public buildings, 2 millions; hospitals, etc., 6 millions. The deficit in 1787 was 198 millions.

When, in 1778, there was war with England over America, the debts increased and the means of liquidating them diminished. Then came Necker and Calonne. Credit was exhausted and no further tax was possible. Calonne was turned down by the Assembly of Notables, he falls and Brienne after him, and Necker comes again. The Parlement of Paris demands the States General, which has not been called for two hundred years. It is to be called on April 27, 1789. All the privileged classes and holders of monopolies were vehement in their opposition to any reform. The young nobles, under the leadership of Philippe Egalité, Duke of Orleans, armed the Paris mob and the peasants against them.

An authority of great interest for this time is Gouverneur Morris, an American who, coming on business, arrived at Havre on January 27, 1789. Jefferson was then ambassador at Versailles. Morris, an acute financier, was the man who, when Lord North sent his conciliatory proposals to the Americans, drew up the reply refusing to treat until independence was acknowledged. He was agent to make a treaty with America over various disputed questions and to make

a treaty of commerce. His shrewd opinions are very valuable as historical matter as he writes to his friends. He is very fearful of what may happen, "for Louis XVI. has himself proclaimed from the throne a wish that every barrier should be thrown down which time or accident may have opposed to the general felicity of the people." He shows us a king wholly unable to cope with a condition which required a man of iron.* The king, he says, "has no talents for action, and, a very religious man, found himself fettered by his oaths to the Constitution, would not step forward, and, of course, there was no standard to which the adherents of the two Chambers could repair." Writing to Jefferson on December 31, 1792, just before the king's murder, Morris says, "To a person less intimately acquainted than you are with the history of human affairs it would seem strange that the mildest monarch who ever filled the French throne, one who is precipitated from it precisely because he would not adopt the harsh measures of his predecessors, a man whom none could charge with a criminal act, should be prosecuted as one of the most nefarious tyrants that ever disgraced the annals of human nature." To which the retort would be ready: read your own Declaration of Independence; this is what you and the Whigs said about King George III.

The second opposed force was this same Declaration of Independence to which King Louis had bound himself when he

* When in 1791, urged by the Queen, Louis accepted the Constitution, he wrote in October a letter to his brothers, urging them to abstain from protest, which would only exasperate the people. He said that violent measures could only lead to horrors of every kind; that a King could never introduce an army of foreigners into his kingdom. “It has been said," he continued (Sybel I., 367) "that a King always seeks to recover his lost power; but 1 cannot on that account enter upon a course which would lead to the ruin of my people, and expose me to the reproaches of my own conscience. I, therefore, unite with the people on giving the constitution a trial. But the people are changed in all their views; the lower classes long for licence and the higher for equality: the former find themselves regarded with respect and the latter see nothing superior to themselves. In the pleasure derived from this proud self-consciousness all other considerations are lost sight of. Every man finds fault with some particular provision of the constitution, and yet hopes that its completion will produce a state of perfect happiness. Every attempt to overthrow it would, I am convinced, rouse a storm, of which no one could see the end. The people must be allowed to put it to the proof, and then they will soon discover that they have been deceived. I am prepared, therefore, to drag on a wretched existence, and I call on you to support my plans by entire resignation on your part; you have indeed sufficient reason to be angry, you have suffered much, but have I passed joyous days?"

entered into war with Britain in favour of her revolted colonies. That Declaration, after setting forth the rights of man, continued: "That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. . . When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government." When, in December, 1791, Tippoo Sahib sent a private message to Louis, asking for 6,000 troops with which to drive the British out of India, Louis, de Moleville says, refused it, saying, "This resembles the affair of America which I never think of without regret. My youth was taken advantage of at that time and we suffer for it now. The lesson is too severe to be forgotten." In the previous October an address had been received, directed to the National Assembly, King, and French nation from "la société constitutionelle des Whigs de Londres, enfans de la liberté," applauding the Revolution. (De Moleville.)

Neither Louis nor any other of the new rulers would appear to have realized that what they were fighting was not merely discontent at existing conditions but a theory, an idea, and further, a false theory and an idea of the imagination. To that theory Louis had assented, and in support of it he had sent French soldiers to fight his ancient enemy. There is only one way in which a wrong theory or a false idea can be fought successfully, and that is by replacing it by a better one, showing the discontented by a speedy removal of grievances the superior advantage of their present condition. You cannot fight an idea, however foolish, whether it was the rights of man in Massachusetts, or Europe in the eighteenth century, or the proletariat socialism and communism which is its lineal descendant in the twentieth by the use of force, which only appears to the man possessed of the idea as proving the weakness of moral authority. Nor can you meet it by conciliation beyond the capacity of the crowd to understand "the secret lets and hindrances which in public proceedings are innumerable and inevitable." Every such situation must be judged by the principle which Milton lays down in the Areopagitica: "This is not the liberty which we can hope, that no grievances should ever arise in the commonwealth-that let no man in

this world expect but when complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed-then is the utmost bound of civil liberty obtained that wise men hope for."

CHAPTER XVI

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

i. The Condition of the French People.-The sufferings of the French people at that time were almost incredible, but there had appeared to be no remedy. They suffered in deadly patience until they had seen a wealthy people in America possessed of every means of happiness which true liberty can give, rise against their rulers and claim and obtain independence. One has to ask oneself with what ideas, with what theories of the betterment of society could the continental rulers at the end of the eighteenth century combat the false absurdities of the doctrine of the rights of man. The existing society was impossible on the face of it. Was it possible to replace it with anything better, and, if so, what?

The attraction of the nobles and the great churchmen to the Court, and their alienation from the people, had gone very much further in France than in any other country. The influence of political and social life which in England was centrifugal, in France was centripetal. The nobles crowded to the Court at Versailles, and the intendant destroyed his local influence, took over his public duties, and separated him from his people and the poor around him. Mr. Justice Shallow and Squire Western were equally absent. As it is expressed, "The flock that was formerly devoured by wolves is now eaten up by lice."

Speaking of the property of the Prince of Soubise, Arthur Young says: "The Duke of Bouillon's and this Prince's are two of the greatest properties in France; and all the signs I have yet seen of their greatness are waste, landes, deserts, fern, ling. 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." Banishment