wielded, fell into internal demoralization, strife of factions, and financial embarrassments, till the very Crown itself was obliged to summon popular forces to war against the privileged. All the springs of State machinery refused to work, coffers were empty, authorities and classes at bitter internecine strife, the army unreliable and undisciplined. It was under circumstances like these that the mass of the people in towns and villages heard from their candidates, advocates, and demagogues, what in truth their rights were. In their ignorance and want, their rudeness and embitterment, they suddenly learnt that for them--as sovereign--limits, obligations, authority no longer existed, that the old corruption and slavish condition was to be thoroughly got rid of, and that then everything would belong to them. They listened with greedy ears, and rushed forward to trample under foot whatever sought to contest these rights of theirs. The highest and noblest aims lured the century on, and animated the hearts of countless worthy men: liberty, well-being, and culture for all, no difference between man and man but that of talent and virtue, fraternity among all citizens in the State and all nations on the earth; these were the ideals that 1780 proclaimed to the world and the future, and therefore the French still love to speak of the deathless principles and fair days of this first epoch of the Revolution. All this, Thiers tells us, would have been admirably realized had not evil-hearted emigrants and foreign Powers by their malignant attacks, driven the most humane of all Revolutions into desperation, a fight for existence, and bloodshed. All would have gone well, says Louis Blanc, had not the wicked Thermidorians, on the occasion of Robespierre's fall, brought in a policy of vice and self-seeking instead of one of virtue and brotherly love. Probably, on the other side the Vosges, eighty men out of every hundred adopt one or other of these views, and so it is easily intelligible that the merciless facts by which Taine shatters these fair pictures should be received with repugnance and surprise by his countrymen. The contrast between such a reality and such an ideal is indeed enormous; fair days, or so much even as one fair day in the course of the Revolution, can no longer be spoken of; in the very hour when absolute monarchy collapsed, a wild, rude, and cruel anarchy covered the land, filling France with violence and crime of every kind for a decade, and lastly causing an unparalleled despotism to appear to the French people salvation and deliverance. The conclusion is unavoidable, either the ideal was good for nothing, and the Coblentz emigrants had right on their side against the nation, or the French people had set about their high task in a quite impracticable way, and their historical fame has this time to be limited to the motto, _In magnis voluisse sat est_. Neither of these alternatives will have a