The States-General under Philip IV. are especially remarkable for their numbers. All tenants-in-chief, whether clerical or lay, were invited to attend in person, and those who were prevented by any unavoidable cause might send proxies. The cathedral chapters and monasteries sent representatives; and so did all the towns of any size in the kingdom. There was no attempt to determine the condition which entitled a man either to vote or to be elected. The only class which was unrepresented was the peasantry. When the States met, they were divided into three estates: clergy, nobles, and citizens. The meeting only lasted a day, and there was no general discussion. The royal spokesman explained the object for which they were summoned, and then each estate separately drew up a document in accordance with the wishes of the king. It is obvious that the summons of the States-General was not in any way forced upon the king by external pressure, but was a mere expedient to strengthen his hands. The assembly never got rid of this taint on their origin. If a French king thought his end could be best attained by summoning the States-General, he summoned them: but if, on the contrary, he thought it advisable to treat separately with the various provinces, he did so. Later in the century an attempt was made to secure regular assemblies with definite authority, but the attempt was a failure, and parliamentary government was never established in France until the nineteenth century. The whole of Philip’s rule is marked by the steady encroachments upon feudal independence and privilege of an unscrupulous but efficient despotism. He claimed for the crown the right of creating peers, which he exercised in favour of Charles II. of Naples and of Robert of Artois. He raised to the rank of nobles men who had no qualification either by descent or by tenure, and was thus enabled to reward those ministers who borrowed from Roman Law the phrase, _quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem_, and coined from it a French legal adage, which the monarchy might have taken for its motto: _que veut le roi, si veut la loi_. But there was one glaring defect in Philip IV.’s government, which he also bequeathed to his successors. His financial [Sidenote: Financial maladministration.] administration was as incompetent as it was tyrannical and oppressive. He strained to the utmost the normal sources of revenue, the income from the domain and the feudal incidents. When these were exhausted, he imposed _gabelles_ or taxes on the sale of commodities. But these taxes he was foolish enough to farm out to his creditors in order to obtain large sums of ready money. Such an expedient, especially in early times, always results in loss to the state and oppression to the taxpayer. More ruinous, because more dishonest, was the constant debasement of the coinage, which Philip carried to such lengths that contemporaries called him the ‘false