Dwellers in towns could more readily coalesce and resist the authority of the seigneurs than dwellers in the country. By trade they acquired wealth, and with wealth influence. In the twelfth century they formed themselves into municipal communities, and, bidding defiance to their seigneurs, called upon their king to aid them in achieving independence. From that time to the end of the seventeenth century the power of the Monarchy grew stronger with every succeeding generation. The king was the dispenser of law and order, while the enemies of law and order were the feudal nobles. When Louis XIV. took the government into his own hands, in 1661, his will was law. Justice was administered by parliaments or law courts acting in the name of the king. The affairs of the provinces were administered by _intendants_, acting by his commission. No nobleman, however wealthy or highly placed, dared to resist his authority. With the frank gaiety of their nation the nobles themselves accepted the position, and crowded to his court or confronted death in his armies. He was able to say, without fear of contradiction, ‘I am the State.’ Unhappily for his people, he could not say ‘I am the Nation.’ In him the Monarchy had been victorious over its enemies, but it had not accomplished its task. The nation wanted more work from its kings, wanted simply that they should go on in the path which had been trodden by their ancestors. The national wish was too feebly expressed to reach the ears of Louis. He was thinking of military glory and courtly display, not of the grievances of his people. He had overthrown the power of the nobility so far as it threatened his own. He did not care to inquire whether there was enough left to produce cruel wrong far off from the splendid palace of Versailles. His great-grandson, the vile, profligate Louis XV., had even less thought for the exercise of the duties of a king, as father of his people. The Monarchy was in its decline, not because it was intentionally tyrannical, but because it had ceased to do its duty. The French people were not Republican. They needed a government, and government in any true sense there was none. ♦Social condition of France.♦ In consequence of the king thus deserting the path trodden by his ancestors, a state of things arose in France such as was found in no other country. Nowhere did the nobility as a class do so little for the service of their countrymen, yet nowhere were they in possession of more social influence or greater privileges. Nowhere were the mercantile and trading classes comparatively more wealthy and intellectual, yet nowhere was the distinction between the noble and the plebeian or bourgeois more rigorously maintained. Finally, in no other country where, as was the case in France, the mass of peasants were free men, did the owners of fiefs retain so many rights over the dwellers on their estates, and yet live in such complete separation from them.