These causes were the necessary results of the dreadful waste of property, and ruin of industry, which had taken place during the first Revolution. The multitude of little proprietors with which France was overspread, could furnish nothing to the metropolis but an endless succession of robust hands to compete with its industry, and starving mouths to share its resources. What could the six millions of French landowners, the majority of them at the plough, afford to lay aside for the luxuries of Paris? Nothing. You might as well expect the West-End shopkeepers of London to be sustained by the starving western Highlanders of Scotland, or the famished crowds of Irish cottars. The natural flow of the wealth of the land to the capital of the kingdom, which invariably sets in when agricultural property is unequally distributed, and a considerable part of it is vested in the hands of territorial magnates, was at once stopped when it became divided among a multitude of persons, not one of whom could afford to travel ten miles from home, or to buy anything but a rustic dress and a blouse to cover it. At least sixty millions sterling, out of the eighty millions which constitute the net territorial produce of France, was turned aside from Paris, and spent entirely in the purchase of the coarsest manufactures or rude subsistence in the provinces. The metropolis came to depend mainly on the expenditure of foreigners, or of the civil and military employés of government. This woful defalcation in its resources occurred at a time, too, when the influx of needy adventurers from the country was daily increasing, from the impossibility of earning a livelihood, amidst the desperate competition of its squalid landowners, and the decline of agriculture, which necessarily resulted from their inability to adopt any of its improvements. Thus the condition of the working classes in Paris went on getting constantly worse, during the whole reign of Louis Philippe; and it was only in consequence of the vast influx of foreigners, which the maintenance of peace and the attractions of the court occasioned, that they were not reduced many years before to the despair and misery which at once occasioned and followed the last revolution.