pleasing sound in the ears of a Liberal Frenchman. But, pleasing or not, the facts are indisputable, and up to the present time each new investigation of authentic documents has only served to give them a wider range and a more assured basis. We have seen the end of the Ancien Régime. The nobles of the former State were unnerved by idleness, debilitated by enjoyment, degraded by immorality; never had the aristocracy of a great nation fallen and been brushed away from the soil of their country, making so feeble a resistance. The leaders of the movement followed a political teaching based on a most one-sided and therefore radically false conception of human nature, and had no idea of the real nature of their fellow-citizens, or of the principles and needs of genuine political life. Finally the masses were unmoved by any political thought whatever, but were darkly conscious of their own wretched state up to the present time, and their hatred of those who had, or were supposed to have, occasioned it, were credulous and impressionable, and penetrated with the rightfulness of their wildest passions and desires. With such materials as these it is possible indeed to blow up an old and half-useless house, but not to construct on its ruins a well-planned and lasting new one. Thus Taine shows by details from documents contemporaneous with the events, how, even before the opening of the National Assembly, the condition of things was out of joint at a hundred points. Tumults and plunder, disobedience to authorities, and maltreatment of obnoxious persons, were the order of the day; public officials were spiritless, and dared not command the already murmuring troops to restore order. The first weeks of the Assembly brought hot discussions as to the union of the three orders, attempts at reactionary State measures, and the taking of the Bastille. Excitement grew from day to day; the suspense throughout the country was tremendous. With the Parisian catastrophes the whole Ancien Régime rocked and gave way from side to side; and not merely privileges and feudal rights, but all State authorities vanished at one blow, or at the first threat from an armed mob resigned their functions. The French nation had positively no government, no laws, no police, no taxation. In place of these they had journals, clubs, societies, popular songs, and Lynch law; security for person and property no longer existed; every one did according to his heart's desire till a stronger than he preferred the opposite and knocked him down. This state of anarchy actually went on thus till the culmination of the Reign of Terror; every now and then it quieted down here or there, to burst out the following day at some other point with redoubled fury. In the midst of the omnipresent turmoil and confusion, the King, a powerless prisoner, sat in the Tuileries. The only quarter which afforded a possibility of the restoration of the State was the National