young orphan she matronised and exhibited-" Pamela, do Héloïse!" And thereupon Pamela, to the applause of the whole assembly, would let down her hair, kneel, and lift up her eyes to heaven with a look of inspiration. Sensibility, in fact, had become an institution.'

It might be added that Revolution was soon to make it acquainted with strange bedfellows. M. Taine tells us that the first number of the Mercure' that appeared after the massacres of September, 1792, contained in its first column an elegy—

'AUX MANES DE MON SERIN!'

It is truly remarked by M. Saint-Marc Girardin, that the writings of Rousseau teem with the strangest contradictions a human soul could exhibit. His Émile,' like his previous paradoxical discourses against the arts and sciences, breathed a spirit of independent, almost savage, individualism. Whereas in his • Contrat Social,' which the passions of the coming time converted into a grim gospel of Jacobinism, Rousseau denudes the individual man of all independence whatever-strips him successively, in the assumed interest of the State, of every individual right. He takes away from him that of family, that of property, and, to complete his subjection to the State, he takes away from him even the right of cultivating any personal relation with his God. Rousseau's Citizen (he was the first to import that title into France from Geneva) receives from the State a God and a religion of State-fabric, as he receives from the State all his other rights and all his other sentiments.

The political writings of Rousseau, more than any other single influence, determined the peculiar political character of the French Revolution. And the political system of Rousseau may be shortly stated as the system of Hobbes democratised—an eighteenth-century edition of the Leviathan ad usum plebis. Never was there a more complete code of despotism than that which was laid down with the method of madness in the 'Contrat Social; and that code was not less Draconic in its sanctions than despotic in its character.* Louis XIV. had pronounced L'État, c'est moi! and the Paris populace, when it had learned the politics of Rousseau from Robespierre, alike assumed to itself the

The Contrat Social' provided for the establishment of a civil religion (destined to be idly paraded in Robespierre's 'Fête de l'Etre Suprême') one article of which was the sacredness of the Contrat Social' and its derivative laws. This new religion was to be maintained in observance by a new Inquisition. 'If anyone,' it was laid down, after having publicly subscribed to these doctrines, conducts himself as if he did not believe them, let him be punished with death; he has committed the greatest of crimes: "il a menti devant les lois."

whole

whole power of the State, in the abused name of the nation. Rousseau had expressly declared the will of the nation at all moments sovereign. He had declared that, in the exercise of that sovereignty, no rule could be prescribed to it, whether it should adhere to-day to its will of yesterday, or change it. But in a great country, to ascertain or collect the will of the whole people at any moment being impossible, it followed by revolutionary logic, that the nearest populace on every emergent occasion assumed itself, as a matter of course, to be the people, and imposed its will on the central or local powers for law. Rousseau had long been a wilful and systematic paradox-monger before he became a maniac; but never, in his wildest or wilfullest illusions, could he have dreamed that the Civil Religion, set forth in his new version of democratic Hobbism, would so soon, with the pikes of the populace for its secular arm, have its Reign of Terror in France.

Could the spirit of Burke revisit the sphere of earthly politics, it would be to find reproduced by the ablest pens of France all those darkest lineaments of the French Revolution which drew down on him, when first prophetically traced in his immortal 'Reflections,' the loud and angry protests of those who claimed in his day to stand forth as the special and exclusive representatives of Liberal principles. From France itself come the most emphatic testimonies to the truth of every word Burke uttered on the nature and portents of her vast volcanic upheaval. Whether we turn to the calm philosophic pages of Tocqueville-to those of the late Prevost-Paradol, Edgar Quinet, Renan, Le Play, Janet, or last, not least, M. Taine-all alike abjure the politics of popular despotism, which the great Apostle of Vanity, as Burke designated Rousseau, worked so powerfully to render supreme in France. All alike trace mainly to the political religion of the Contrat Social' the specific shape assumed there by democratic anarchy, and democratic dictatorship and terrorism. And the concurrent tribute to the insight and foresight of our illustrious countryman is the more remarkable as the less conscious and intentional. There has been on the part of recent French writers on their great Revolution no conscious concurrence in raising a monument to Burke. Not the less effectively have they assisted in raising it—not the less will it stand perennial and colossal.

Where Burke's view of the French Revolution was incomplete, was in his perception, not of its nature, but of its sources. These we have endeavoured to illustrate from the abundant materials before us. The eminent critical faculty which M. Taine had amply proved in his former works, comes out conspicuously

in the lucid view presented in his present volume of the special adaptation of the French philosophy of the last century to satisfy the fastidious conversational tastes of a very intelligent, but very superficial, upper-public, and the utter incompetence of the raison raisonnante alone cultivated by that public to explore the historical antecedents and actual conditions of the life of a nation, and therefore to form any sound or trustworthy judgment what changes its political and social constitution might need or could bear. The world of that day, says M. Taine, for want of comprehending the past did not comprehend the present; had no accurate idea of the peasant, the working man, the provincial bourgeois, or even of the provincial noble. All these figures they saw half-effaced by distance, transformed and embellished by philosophical theories and the haze of sentiment. Jacques Bonhomme let them know who he was presently, and he is letting every one again know who he is now. He is the overwhelmingly preponderant Constituent Power of France, by grace of Universal Suffrage.

The following observation of Dumont, in his Souvenirs sur Mirabeau,' on the causes of the French Revolution (he would have expressed himself more correctly by saying, on the causes which stamped on the French Revolution its special and distinctive characters of sophistry and atrocity) is pregnant with much matter for reflection :

'People argue without end about the causes of the Revolution. In my opinion, it had only one determining and efficient cause-the character of the King. Substitute for Louis XVI. a monarch of firm and decided character, and the Revolution would not have taken place.'

Dumont should have said—such a revolution would not have taken place as that which fatally developed itself.

'His whole reign,' proceeds Dumont, had no other effect than that of bringing it on. There was no time during the first [Constituent] Assembly at which the King, could he but have changed his character, might not have recovered his authority, and established a mixed constitution, firmer and more solid than ever had been the parliamentary and nobiliary monarchy of France. His indecision, his weakness, his half-councils, his half-measures, ruined everything. Secondary causes did but develop that first cause. When the prince is weak, courtiers become intriguing, demagogues insolent, the people audacious. Honest men are intimidated, able men discouraged, the best advice followed to no fruitful issue. A King who should have shown dignity and energy of character would have drawn towards himself all who, as matters went, took part against him. The Lafayettes, the Lameths, the Mirabeaus, the Siéyès, would not even have conceived the idea of playing the part which they actually did Vol. 141.-No. 282.

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play;

play; and, having been set to work on quite another plan, would have seemed quite other men.'

In all revolutions there are two principal factors. First, a general change which has taken place in men's minds, necessarily drawing after it some corresponding change in their social relations. Such a general revolution of mind was already accomplished in France, even before the accession of Louis XVI. to the throne. Secondly, the characters and passions of men, and the posture of affairs at the final epoch, when organic reforms in the State force themselves on for discussion and adoption. It is perfectly true that Louis XVI.'s whole reign tended to bring on revolution. But it is equally true that this tendency was in men's minds before it was in public measures. The whole question was whether the King's Government should show itself able to take a decided initiative in those measures which the temper of the times required; and in old France those measures must in substance have been revolutionary, however appearances might and ought to have been saved in form; or whether it should wait till the initiative was taken out of its hands by the people-or rather by the agitators who had the ear of the people -whether reforms should be planned by statesmen or dictated by demagogues. It is quite true, as Dumont says, that the one thing needful in 1789 was a King of firm and decided character. The King's name was the sole tower of strength left in France ; and a King who should have felt that strength, and discerned its use, might have saved France from the sinister turn of events that followed. Even Louis XV., in his last enfeebled years, had struck a successful coup d'état by abolishing the parlements and setting up a new judicature in their stead-a good riddance of the arrogant pretensions to political power in those bodies, and a good clearance of the ground for a genuine constitutional system. True, Louis XV. and his chancellor, Maupeou, had struck down the parlements in the sole interest of despotism. But not less true that Louis XVI., with a Machault or Turgot beside him, might have raised some more substantial structure of political liberties on the site whence these turbulent and antiquated assemblies had been thus summarily swept away. One of the first steps, however, of the young monarch on his accession, under the plausible and popularity-seeking misguidance of Maurepas, was to restore the parlements, and again gratuitously expose the measures of the King's Government to the fitful and capricious opposition of those inept and irresponsible bodies. When the Chancellor Maupeou's dismissal from the ministry was announced to him by the Duke de la Vrillière, he contented himself with saying,

saying, J'avais fait gagner un grand procès au roi, il veut remettre en question ce qui était décidé; il en est le maître.'

We have ourselves little doubt that if instead of Louis XVI. there had mounted the throne of France, in 1774, a King possessed of the political genius of Mirabeau, the pure public spirit of Turgot, with the sword of Frederick II. of Prussia in his hand, and with Frederick's army at his back, such a King might have impressed on the French Revolution what direction he pleased -except a retrograde one into the old ornière of aristocratic privilege and plebeian oppression. But was it to be expected that a prince born in the purple, brought up amidst those empty forms of Court ceremonial which Louis XIV. had taught the nobility of France to regard as the main duties they had to discharge to their King and country-was it to be expected that one who did not wield the sword of Frederick, nor was backed by such an army, so officered, and so disciplined, as that which Frederick's father had placed at his absolute disposal, should, at the crisis of the fate of France and of Europe, have had energy to impose, or power to enforce, submission alike on aristocratic arrogance, and democratic impatience? Louis XVI. would have needed both a firm will and a reliable force-neither of which he possessed-to have taken successfully the initiative in carrying out that royal revolution, which he had in effect commenced when he called together the States-General.

At that momentous epoch, France displayed the double phenomenon, elsewhere unparalleled, of a moneyed class malcontent in proportion to their investments in public securities, and a landed class revolutionary in proportion to their purchases of landed property. Paris furnished three distinct contingents to the grand army of national discontent, which had been everywhere recruiting from about the middle of the eighteenth century. First, the frondeuse philosophy of the Liberal-aristocratic salons. Secondly, the increasing ill-temper of a moneyed bourgeoisie, galled in its roturier self-respect by the irrepressible insolence of the Court nobles, and alarmed for its investments, which had become considerable, in Government securities, by the perpetual prospect of recurrence to the old royal resource of bankruptcy. Thirdly, the turbulent element, comparatively of recent growth, of a large prolétaire population, whose numbers in the metropolis are calculated to have been doubled during the reign of Louis XVI., by the exceptional franchises accorded in that reign to the manufacturing faubourgs. And beneath and behind these metropolitan hotbeds of revolution lay that vast subject stratum of twenty millions of French peasants, the last to receive, but, when once fairly aroused, the most formidable recipients of that