Very likely, as his friends, and especially his daughter, asserted, no Minister, however gifted, could have succeeded entirely in such a crisis; and doubtless he was as far as any merely pure-minded man could be from deserving the storm of execration with which the Court party eventually overwhelmed him. We have said that he did his best; his mistake was that he did his best for everybody. In a moment, when an unhesitating choice had become imperative, he was divided between sympathy with the people and pity for the King. He returned to power without any plan of his own; but finding Louis XVI. was pledged to assemble the States-General, he insisted that the representation of the Tiers Etat should be doubled, so as to balance the influence of the other two parties. Royalists affirm that this was a fatal error, since from that hour the Revolution became inevitable. Madame de Staël, jealous of her father’s reputation, maintains that reasonable concessions on the part of the Court faction and the higher clergy would have nullified the danger of the double representation. But the point was that such an aristocracy and such a clergy were by nature unteachable; and every moment wasted in attempting to persuade them was an hour added to the long torture of oppressed and starving France. The kind heart, liberal instincts, and administrative ability of Necker taught him that without the double representation the voice of the people might be lifted in vain. But the weakness of his character, and the awe of his bourgeois soul for the time-honored fetich of monarchy, prevented his understanding that the power he invoked could never again be laid by any spell of his choosing. By seeking to arrange this or that, to pare off something here and add something there—in a word, by trying to be just all round, when nobody cared for mutual justice but himself, he rendered a divided allegiance to his country and his King. If there were no conscious duplicity in his character, there was abundance of it in his opinions; and to say that nobody could have succeeded better is to beg the question. In the face of the savage, inflexible arrogance of the aristocrats and clergy, there was but one course open to a really high-minded man, and that was to leave the Court to its own devices, and, throwing himself with all of earnestness and wisdom that he possessed into the popular cause, to be guided by it, and yet govern it by force of sympathy and will. He might have failed; in the light of later events, it can even be said that he would have failed. But such a failure would have been grander, more vital for good and sterile for harm, than the opprobrium which eventually visited the honest Necker and pursued him to his grave.