The dormant desire had long been present in the breasts of the poor of the French nation for equality and liberty. The quickening influences and light radiating from the new Republic of the West, among whose children the sons of France had served in the struggle for independence, soon ignited the fires in the heart of the impetuous Frenchman. Louis XVI. had been more condescending than any of his predecessors; he occupied, possibly, a higher position in the hearts of the people than any king the French had had since Henry IV. But the time had come when, inspired by the example of the Americans, the crime of “caste” in France had become unendurable. Louis XVI. was, of all the Bourbon kings, probably the least objectionable. His character, while weak and influenced by the stronger will of Marie Antoinette, did not represent the worst phases of the character of Louis XV. or Louis XIV. Gradually, but irresistibly by attrition, the will of the people had been making marks upon the royalty of France. The tyranny, insolence, and arrogance of Louis XIV., in whose presence one dared not speak, had been lessened in Louis XV. to the extent that one could speak in a whisper; but in the presence of Louis XVI. one might speak aloud. With tireless, resistless, sullen determination the billows of the sea of humanity, wherein all is equality and fraternity, had beaten upon this rock of adamant until these divine Bourbon kings had become impressed by its constant, ceaseless energy. Weak, amiable, and pliable as Louis XVI. was, poor Jacques had been so long deprived of one heart-beat of feeling that his bosom could no longer restrain the emotions of liberty and equality. The nobles of France, more than Louis XVI., retained the impress of the reign of Louis XIV., “the Glorious” (?), who had proclaimed that he was a Sun; and while the ruling monarch, as the bulwark of royalty, “caste,” and social inequality, had received the first shock of the wave and been marked thereby; still the nobility, sheltered behind the bulwark of the personality of the king, continued to indulge the wild license of their privileges and “caste” distinction, gamboling like lambs upon the greensward of their delusion, becoming fattened for the knife of that butcher that was sure to follow, the guillotine. A more powerful, touching, and realistic picture was never drawn of the arrogance and presumption of the nobles, privileged classes, “higher caste,” than that made by the people’s author, the man who of all others has nearer touched the hearts of the Common People, who will be loved and revered when others more learned may be forgotten, because he wrote of scenes of sensation, emotion, and relations of the Common People--Charles Dickens--in the “Tale of Two Cities,” and for our purpose it would be impossible to find words more fitting than those used by this master delineator of the feelings, thoughts, heart-throbs, and wrongs of the Common People: