“Came ye straight in descent from Bernard the Dane, or the faithful Osmond; though your ancestors were liege men of Merowig or Charlemagne, yet hope not, poor gentleman! that Hodge shall have any reverence for your rank and title. Wear your orders, gird on your sword, and go to the cattle fair; the best of you will meet with less respect than John the Burgess, with his good cloak and leather wallet stuffed with coin. I know not why, but this brutish herd has lost all confidence in the word of a man of rank, of old so much esteemed.” This stubborn and stalwart disrespect, this frank irreverence of the French peasant, struck more than one acute observer, on the eve of ’89. Mirabeau, in his _L’Ami des Hommes_ has remarked the same trait, but not without supplying an explanation: “In my own lifetime” (he writes) “I have seen a great change in the relations of landlord and peasant. Our lords, always absent at court, are no longer of any use or service to their tenantry, and it is natural that, forgetting, they should also be forgot.” VII Then came the Revolution, an event so great that I cannot hope to give the faintest, smallest image of it in this tiny frame. A world perished, and rose anew from its ashes, purified of many abuses, deprived of some valuable relics. But the substance of that world, which is French society, reappeared, after seeming annihilation, not greatly changed, nor absolutely renovated. Of this there are a cloud of witnesses. Among them let us choose Larochefoucauld-Liancourt, whom we left an exile in America. Restored to his native country in 1800, after some ten years’ absence, he notes the progress of agricultural reform. Large estates have given place to very small ones, which, as a rule, produce a yield at least one-fourth more abundant than the old. Everywhere cultivation is more intelligent, for the owner puts his mind into his tillage. The homes of the peasants are improved, more spacious and cleaner; the labourers themselves are certainly less ignorant than their fathers. “Ils sont plus qu’eux en état de réfléchir, de combiner, un peu moins éloignés de toute innovation.” So writes, disinterestedly, the dispossessed Duke, as he sets the plough in the stately lawns and avenues planted by Le Nôtre, content to farm a corner of his old estate, camped in the servant’s quarters of his ruined palace. We could not have a more able or a more conscientious authority. But these were but the beginnings of a general reform. In 1815 another philosophic English traveller passing through France--one Thomas Hodgskin--was struck by the sordid misery of the French peasant. And, in fact, the Revolution is not over even yet.