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

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impulse

impulse to change which, for a whole generation at least, all classes above them seemed emulously eager to give. Peasant penuriousness had, in many instances, scraped together the means to purchase the lands which noble prodigality found itself forced to sell. But, as the bourgeois fundholder felt no conservative sense of safety in his public securities, so the peasant landowner had no unvexed enjoyment of his newlyacquired property. He might be said to have acquired little else than extended liability to the double and overwhelming pressure of seigneurial dues and government taxes.

In this state of things, the tranquil insouciance of the privileged orders seemed proof to all portents.

Never,' says M. Taine, was blindness more wilful and more. total. The Duke of Orleans offered to bet a hundred louis that the States-General would separate without doing anything-without even abolishing lettres de cachet. After the work of demolition was actually commenced-nay, after it was consummated-the privileged orders arrived at no more correct judgments. They had no idea of what the social edifice was; they had never put a hand to it. They ended by thinking, that it would be best to let it fall completely, without an effort to save it. It would not fail to rebuild itself of its own accord they should not fail to re-enter their salons restored and regilt, and recommence the agreeable conversation interrupted for the moment by an accident a street-tumult. Clear sighted in society, their eyes were dim in politics. They saw everything admirably by the artificial light of wax candles; but natural daylight confused and dazzled them. Their visual organs, applied so long to the delicate details of polished life, had no clear apprehension of popular lifethe life of the masses; and in the new element, in which they found themselves suddenly plunged, the very fineness of microscopic perception they possessed destroyed their insight.

It was necessary however to act; for danger was at their door, at their throats. But the danger was a danger of an ignoble description, and their education afforded them no appropriate arms against it. They had learned fencing, but not boxing. To engage in conflicts with porters and poissardes, to take their antagonist at the club by the collar, to harangue at street corners, to bring fists and cudgels to bear on the brutes and madmen, who employed no other argument than that of physical force (as the jeunesse dorée did with good effect at a later epoch), to take up the truncheon of special constable, to spare neither their own skin nor the skins of others, to confront the common people in the guise of common people-these were simple and effective modes of proceeding. But to have recourse to them did not even enter into the heads of well-bred persons; they neither knew how nor chose to make use of their hands for such work. Such a ing was never seen as for a gentleman arrested in his own house to ak the head of the Jacobin clubbist who arrested him. To make a disturbance

a disturbance or scene of any kind would have been bad taste. For them the first consideration was to remain what they were, gens de bonne compagnie. In prison, men and women dressed with care, paid and received visits, held salons at the end of a corridor, by the light of four candles. No matter; they could exchange pleasantries, devise madrigals, sing songs, pique themselves on being as gay and gallant as ever. Must one become morose and illbred, merely because one finds oneself accidentally lodged in a bad inn? Before their revolutionary judges-on the cart to the guillotine-they retained their smile and dignity. Women in particular went to the scaffold with as much ease and serenity as though they were going to a soirée.'

When the sword of France fell from the feeble hand of Louis XVI., the question for the future was, What firmer hand should finally grasp it? When Authority ceases to command traditional respect, Force alone can compel obedience. Force, indeed, is the ultima ratio of all authority; but where the legitimacy of the established powers of the State has not been called in question-where the continuity of the national existence has not been broken-force never nakedly occupies the foreground of the political scene. The value of the sanction of time and usage to authority is not felt till it is lost. It was lost to the old Monarchy of France in July, 1789, and its armed substitute was not effectively established till November, 1799the epoch of the 18th Brumaire. Within those ten years, the wheel of Revolution had run full circle—the advocate's tongue, and the popular journalist's pen, had finally given place to the Soldier of Fortune's sword.

ART. V.-1. Report of a Mission to Yarkund in 1873, under Command of Sir T. D. Forsyth, K.C.S.I., C.B., Bengal Civil Service. With Historical and Geographical Information regarding the Possessions of the Ameer of Yarkund. Calcutta: printed at the Foreign Department Press, 1875.

2. Kashmir and Kashghar: a narrative of the Journey of the Embassy to Kashghar in 1873–74. By W. H. Bellew, C.S.I., Surgeon-Major, Bengal Staff Corps. London, 1875.

3. Central Asia: A Contribution towards the better knowledge of its Topography, Ethnography, Resources, and History. Compiled under the direction of Lieut.-Colonel C. M. MacGregor, C.S.I., assisted by Major Bates and Captains Lockhart, J. M. Trotter, and H. Collett. Quartermaster-General's Depart

ment.

Calcutta, 1873.

4. Narratives