had laid down definitions of these two words, which I recommend to any one for consideration before a study of the eighteenth century. Montesquieu's definition of liberty is as follows: "La liberté politique consiste dans la sûreté ou du moins dans l'opinion que l'on a de la sûreté. Cette sûreté n'est plus attaquée que dans les accusations publiques ou privées. C'est donc de la bonté des lois criminelles que dépend principalement la liberté du citoyen." (Bk. xii, c. 2.) Of equality he says: "Le véritable esprit de l'égalité ne cherche pas à n'avoir point de maîtres, mais à n'avoir que ses égaux pour maîtres. Dans l'état de nature les hommes naissent bien dans l'égalité; mais ils n'y sauraient rester. La société la leur fait perdre, et ils ne redeviennent égaux que par les lois." (Bk. viii, c. 3.)

'Natural liberty," says Blackstone, "is a right inherent in us by birth and one of the gifts of God to man at his creation. But every man, when he enters into society, gives up a part of his natural liberty, as the price of so valuable a purchase: and in consideration of receiving the advantages of mutual commerce obliges himself to conform to those laws which the community has thought proper to establish . . . political therefore, or civil liberty, which is that of a member of society, is no other than natural liberty, so far restrained by human laws (and no further) as is necessary and expedient for the general advantage of the public. . . . Law which restrains a man from doing mischief to his fellow citizens increases the civil liberty of mankind." Obedience to law, as the guarantee of liberty, is the keynote of both these writers.

The sane members of the French Assembly in 1791, opposing the Declaration of Rights as unnecessary, take the same ground. "In speaking to men only of their rights," said Malouet and the Bishop of Langres," they incurred a dangerous risk, since there is no right of nature which is not modified by (le droit positif) practical law. "Why," said he, "carry them to the top of the mountain and show them the territory (domaine) which belongs to them, when one is at once obliged to bring them down, and put them in a political order where they must find boundaries at every step?"

As the century struggled on its way, the philosophers, and then the politicians, and after them the mob, began to make a

tentative use of these well-worn catchwords. The revolutions political and economic which passed over Europe came after long preparation, as the match put to the fire well laid, as the electric switch which brings into action the force-producing light and heat.

"The French," says the Bishop of Langres, "are not Americans. These are a young people, entirely composed of freeholders (propriétaires) already accustomed to equality, ignorant of feudalism, and prepared to receive liberty with all their hearts, in contrast to France, a nation grown old in the midst of differing laws, formed of an immense mass of men without property, and always provoked with good cause at the sight of luxury and wealth." It was a most severe indictment of the American rebellion.

So long as the discontent and the despair touched only the isolated peasant in his fields or the small shopkeeper and handworker in the towns, their grievances and their sufferings made a danger to society slow to mature, not readily expressed, and possible to be met by partial or local concessions from a wise ruler. It was a difficult matter to disturb the structure of society so long as the king, ruler or oppressor by divine right, supported by the Roman Church, and by the nobles exercising by right of high lineage and long tradition a variety of admitted privileges, armed with the long past of leadership and authority, and holding all offices of power and all elements of prestige, faced with a horde of official followers the mass of men who could not claim nobility, whether trader or farmer or peasant.

But economic causes throughout the seventeenth century had been bringing into prominence a new class of men whose claim to a share of power did not rest on noble birth, but on wealth and intelligence, the class of great merchants and financiers which had been called into being by the immense development of sea-borne commerce with the new world and with the East, by the improved methods of agriculture resulting from the pressure of increased population, by the growth of banking to meet the needs of a larger credit, and by the necessity for improved transport. This class would not naturally be content with an existing order of caste from which they were excluded. In England, where the laws which regulated trade

came not from the king but from the people, where there was not the domination of a military caste, or the barrier between the noble and the non-noble, there was not the same jealous opposition to privilege as on the Continent. But when the great outbreak comes in the last quarter of the century, the merchants of France who have seen the maritime supremacy of Colbert and the trade and colonial revival of Fleury destroyed by the reckless military policy of their kings, though not desiring revolution, were ready to listen to theories of reconstruction of the social forms under which they suffered.

It should be understood that the cause of the outpouring of the European naval peoples to other continents in the eighteenth century was not political, but was a seeking of new territory for monopoly of trade. Every nation claimed monopoly of the trade in its colonies and acquired territory.

As we acquired French colonial territory the trade of that territory lost to the French passed ipso facto to the victor, except so far as the French could retain it by trading under the Dutch or some other neutral flag, or by the illimitable smuggling which then accompanied all trade. When freedom of trade was spoken of by the theorists of that century, it was but a protest against the principle of monopoly. It assumed bargaining for a good position and frequent revision of tariffs. The monopoly had nothing in common with the transitional nineteenth century doctrine of allowing aliens not contributing to our wealth, or performing any one of the obligations of citizens to import goods into a country to the detriment of its labour, protecting by ever increasing tariffs their own industries, while the people in the country of import are encouraged to live idly on the cheaper products from abroad without using their minds to improve their own resources. This sacrosanct political absurdity is the negation of free trade, rendering free trade impossible. The movement in favour of Free Trade in the eighteenth century was the free exchange of commodities in accord with the definition of Sir Robert Peel," the right to buy in the cheapest and to sell in the dearest markets."

Commercial interests played a great part, but generally an unseen part, throughout the century, both in Europe and in America and in the Indies East and West, as befits the men who find the money. In England such men formed the strength of

the Whigs, who brought in Dutch William and held the country for the first two Georges against the Stuarts: it is their desire for commercial monopoly which brings on the American War.

The workmen who carried out these revolutionary theories of liberty of course extended the word "freedom" to trade. In France they suppressed all interior douanes, and made one uniform tariff for all outside France. In the islands, where the absence of internal tariffs did not create urgency, the political reformers were not so much moved by the phrases. But the theorists on both sides banged the drum loudly. Law much earlier, by the side of his expression of belief that paper could replace the use of metal currencies, professed the new theories on credit and commerce. He stood for the reform of the system of Colbert, on which the administration of Louis XIV. rested at his death, confusing economic policy with the results of the unnecessary wars of the kings, which had brought about such heavy and unequal burdens on the people.

Thought under Louis XV. had become comparatively more free, problems commercial, colonial as well as political being discussed in the salons, where the system of state regulation of commerce was freely attacked and censured by the theorists.

About 1750 two brilliant writers, Vincent Marquis de Gournay, and Quesnay, physician to the King, set out in search of a system of political economy, like Adam Smith and others in the islands. They maintained the entire freedom of trade competition as most profitable to the nation, including, according to Gournay, the liberty of labour. No monopolies, no privileges, no burdens they said, which recoil disastrously on revenue and capital. Quesnay disputed the theory of the balance of trade, and the benefits of money returns. One cannot tell, he says, by the state of the balance of trade between different nations, the state of wealth. They argue that the trade suitable and natural to either is equally favourable to both. The Marquis d'Argenson in 1742, Claude Dupin in 1748, also proclaimed freedom of trade. Mercier de la Rivière went even further, and did not ask for reciprocity, but approached our modern theory of free imports. Montesquieu, in 1748, looking to the practical side, said, "La finance détruit le commerce par ses injustices, par ses vexations, par l'excès de ce qu'elle impose."

Voltaire made great fun of these doctrines of the Économistes or Physiocrates, as they were called; but the new ideas made their way, and helped to create a new economic science, because they presented the economic facts in an ordered and natural way. The theorists went on disputing side by side down to the revolution, the new theory being always to the forefront, and dominant in the Constituent Assembly.

But the practical Frenchman was torn between the nice soft voice of liberty and the facts of common sense.

in the resounding gospel by hesitating provisoes.

They hedged

Melon, an old clerk of Law in 1734, while agreeing that liberty is that which is most essential to commerce, qualifies it, that it ought not to consist of imprudent licence, and defends the privileged Companies: "Moi aussi," says Goudard, a silk manufacturer of Lyons, one of a commission of three appointed to report on the Treaty with Great Britain in 1786, "moi aussi, je viens vous demander la liberté : elle est la devise du commerce, et de toute industrie: mais elle est incomplète sans la protection et la sûreté je vous demande d'accorder au commerce et à l'industrie la liberté d'exister," on which the editor comments, "les fabricants de soieries à Lyons étaient à cette époque protectionistes.

Unfortunately for the French and for the world, when their great revolt against all authority matured, the party of idealists in France, the empirics who proposed to reconstruct society from the foundations, left to one side both the practice of compromise and the principles which govern commerce and the arts of industry. They disdained to take lessons from the past, ignoring all that history and philosophy could teach them about the foundations of human life. Law, whether human or divine, and the social duty which rested on it, were contemptuously thrust to one side. In their bumptious ignorance they went outside the existing society as incapable of reformation, and imagined a primitive condition out of which the new system of living could be devised. And in the place of law, without which no liberty or equality of any kind can exist, they enthroned force. The guarantee of the rights of man and of the citizen makes necessary, says their Declaration of Rights, a public force. This force then is instituted for the advantage of all... the maintenance of the public force and for the expenses of

For