illegitimate action of the government, or the government itself against the inevitable action of time. Thus did the government promote its own decay. It was not Louis XIV. alone that grew old and feeble at the end of his reign, but the whole principle of absolute power. Pure monarchy was as emasculated in 1712 as the monarch himself. And the evil was the more serious, in consequence of Louis XIV. having abolished political habits as well as institutions. Political habits cannot exist without independence. He alone who feels his own strength is capable either of serving power or of resisting it. Energetic characteristics disappear with the loss of independence, and dignity of mind can be sustained only by the assuredness of rights. The real state in which Louis XIV. left France was, therefore, a society in full intellectual vigour and activity, and by its side a government essentially stationary, and without any means of reanimating itself, or taking part in the movement of its subjects; but after half a century of splendour, doomed to stagnation and feebleness, and whilst its founder was still alive, sank into a decay which nearly resembled dissolution. This was the situation in which France was placed at the close of the seventeenth century, and which gave to the following age so different a direction and character. It is scarcely necessary for me to say that the burst of the human mind, the spirit of free inquiry, was the paramount feature of the eighteenth century. This influential epoch has been treated of, and so ably handled by others who have gone before me, that I am relieved from the necessity of following minutely all the phases of the wondrous moral revolution which was then accomplished. I am, however, anxious to note certain points which have been somewhat overlooked. The first which strikes my mind is one I have already alluded to--namely, the almost complete disappearance, so to speak, of the government in the course of the eighteenth century, and the prominence of the human mind as the principal and almost only actor. Excepting the external relations attended to by the ministry of the Duke de Choiseul, and some concessions made to public opinion--for example, the American war--there never, perhaps, was a government so inactive, so apathetic and inert, as the French government of that time. In place of the stirring and ambitious government of Louis XIV., which interfered with everything, and placed itself at the head of all, we see a power anxious only to keep in the background, so weak and shattered did it feel itself. The activity and the ambition had passed to the nation, which, by its opinions and its intellectual movement, mixed and interfered with all things, and, in short, alone possessed that moral authority which confers a veritable sway. {239}