privileged orders, lay all the power, all the authority which for the most part they misused or abused. It has been said with truth that the man who did not belong to the privileged orders had scarcely any more influence upon the laws which bound him and which ground him than if he lived in Mars or Saturn instead of in Picardy or Franche Comte. Such a system of government, which could only have been found tolerable if it had been swayed by a brotherhood of saints and sages, was, as a matter of fact, worked in the worst manner possible and for the worst purposes. The conditions under which the vast mass of the French people lived, struggled, suffered, and died were so cruel that it is hard indeed to believe them compatible with the high degree of civilization which, in other respects, France had reached. A merciless and most comprehensive process of taxation squeezed life and hope out of the French nation {292} for the benefit of a nobility whose corruption was only rivalled by its worthlessness and an ecclesiasticism that had forgotten the Sermon on the Mount and the way to Calvary. But if the condition of France was bad it contained the germs of improvement. A greater freedom of thought, a greater freedom of speech were beginning, very gradually, to assert themselves and to make their influence felt. Philosophical speculation on sorrow and suffering turned the minds of men to thoughts of how that sorrow might be stanched and that suffering abated. The slowly rising tide of thought was blown into an angry sea by a wind from the west, and in a little while a scarcely suspected storm became a hurricane that swept into a common ruin everything that opposed its fury. England had long been looked up to by French reformers as the pattern for the changes they desired to see brought about in their own country. The moderation and equality of its laws, as compared with those of France, the facilities of utterance afforded to the popular voice, made it seem a veritable Utopia to eyes dimmed by the mist of French feudality. But now another and a greater England had arisen in the New World. Across the Atlantic the descendants of the men who had overthrown a dynasty and beheaded a king had shaken themselves free from forms of oppression that seemed mild indeed to Frenchmen, and had proclaimed themselves the champions of theories of social liberty and political freedom which had been dreamed of by French philosophers but had never yet been put into practice. Rebellious America had fired the enthusiasm of gallant French adventurers; successful, independent America animated the hopes and spurred the imaginations of those whose eyes turned in longing admiration from the seasoned constitution of monarchical England to the as yet green constitution of republican America. [Sidenote: 1789--Revival of the States-General in France]