What, actually and practically, were the means of government in the hands of the king? "Get rid of _lettres de cachet_," observed Malesherbes, "and you deprive the king of all his authority, for the _lettre de cachet_ is the only means he possesses of enforcing his will in the kingdom." Now, for several years past, the royal power had practically renounced _lettres de cachet_. On the other hand, during the course of the eighteenth century, the sentiments of affection and devotion of which we have spoken had become enfeebled, or at least had changed their character. So it was that on the eve of the Revolution the royal power, which stood in France for the entire administration, had, if the expression may be allowed, melted into thin air. Below the royal power, the lords in the country, the upper ten in the towns, constituted the second degree in the government. The same remarks apply here also. And unhappily it is certain that, over the greater part of France, the territorial lords had forgotten the duties which their privileges and their station imposed. The old attachment of the labouring classes to them had almost everywhere disappeared, and in many particulars had given place to feelings of hostility. Thus on the eve of '89 the whole fabric of the state had no longer any real existence: at the first shock it was bound to crumble into dust. And as, behind the fragile outer wall, there was no solid structure--no administrative machine, with its numerous, diverse, and nicely-balanced parts, like that which in our time acts as a buffer against the shocks of political crises,--the first blow aimed at the royal power was bound to plunge the whole country into a state of disorganization and disorder from which the tyranny of the Terror, brutal, blood-stained, overwhelming as it was, alone could rescue it. Such is the first of the two facts we desire to make clear. We come now to the second. Ever since the year 1780, France had been almost continually in a state of famine. The rapidity and the abundance of the international exchanges which in our days supply us constantly from the remotest corners of the world with the necessaries of life, prevent our knowing anything of those terrible crises which in former days swept over the nations. "The dearth," writes Taine, "permanent, prolonged, having already lasted ten years, and aggravated by the very outbreaks which it provoked, went on adding fuel to all the passions of men till they reached a blaze of madness." "The nearer we come to the Fourteenth of July," says an eye witness, "the greater the famine becomes." "In consequence of the bad harvest," writes Schmidt, "the price of bread had been steadily rising from the opening of the year 1789. This state of things was utilized by the agitators who aimed at driving the people into excesses: these excesses in turn paralyzed trade. Business ceased, and numbers of workers found themselves without bread."