In France alone a view of public affairs had grown up which impelled the nation to create its reforms for itself. If the substance of many of the French revolutionary changes coincided with the objects of Austrian or of Tuscan reform, there was nothing similar in their method. In other countries reform sprang from the command of an enlightened ruler; in France it started with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and aimed at the creation of local authority to be exercised by the citizens themselves. The source of this difference lay partly in the influence of England and America upon French opinion, but much more in the existence within France of a numerous and energetic middle class, enriched by commerce, and keenly interested in all the speculation and literary activity of the age. This was a class that both understood the wrongs which the other classes inflicted or suffered, and felt itself capable of redressing them. For the flogged and over-driven peasant in Naples or Hungary no ally existed but the Crown. In most of those poor and backward States which made up monarchical Europe, the fraction of the inhabitants which neither enjoyed privilege nor stood in bondage to it was too small to think of forcing itself into power. The nobles sought to preserve their feudal rights: the Crown sought to reduce them; the nation, elsewhere than in France, did not intervene and lay hands upon power for itself, because the nation was nothing but the four mutually exclusive classes of the landlords who commanded, the peasants who served, the priests who idled, and the soldiers who fought. France differed from all the other monarchies of the Continent in possessing a public which blended all classes and was dominated by none; a public comprehending thousands of men who were familiar with the great interests of society, and who, whether noble or not noble, possessed the wealth and the intelligence that made them rightly desire a share in power. [Movements against governments outside France.]