On the other hand, let us carry a burgess of the nineteenth century back to the twelfth, and he will find things under the same double aspect, but the situations changed. Contemplating the general affairs of the age, the state, the government of the country, and society at large, we see or hear nothing of the burgesses; they are altogether without importance in the state. And not only so, but in speaking or thinking of themselves and their situation in relation to the general government of France, their language is timid and humble in the extreme. Their old masters, the lords of fiefs, from whom they wrung their franchises, are found treating them, in words at least, with a pride which surprises us, but was far from astonishing or irritating them. But entering into the borough itself, and surveying what is there passing, we find the scene changed. We are in a sort of fortified place, defended by the armed burgesses, who tax themselves, elect their own magistrates, sit in judgment, inflict punishments, and assemble to deliberate upon their own affairs; making war even against their lord, and having their own militia. In a word, they govern themselves, and are superior to control. Here is a contrast of the same order as that which so much surprised the burgess of the twelfth century in the France of the eighteenth, only the parts are reversed. In the latter, the burgher order or nation is everything, the borough nothing; in the former, the degrees of importance are diametrically opposite. Assuredly many things and many extraordinary events must have passed, and many revolutions have been accomplished between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries, to produce so prodigious a change in the state of one social class. Yet, in spite of this change, there is no doubt that the third estate of 1789 was, politically speaking, the descendant and heir of the burghers of the twelfth century. That haughty and ambitious 'French nation,' which raised its pretensions so high, proclaimed its sovereignty with such pomposity, and pretended not only to regenerate and govern itself, but also to govern and regenerate the world, incontestibly descended from those borough communities, who made their obscure though courageous stands in the twelfth century, with the sole object of throwing off the tyrannical yoke of nameless lords in their respective isolated corners.