But while the majority thus passed out of politics, an active and dissatisfied minority remained. All over France, and especially in Paris and in the great provincial cities, there were many, in 1791, to whom the policy of the leaders of the Revolution, and the action of the great party which ranged itself behind Lafayette and the Lameths, had caused increasing discontent. To them the Revolution, so satisfactory to many, had brought only disappointment. Their vague but ardent anticipations of a new social state seemed as far as ever from realisation. The leaders of the Assembly were beginning to speak of the Revolution as accomplished, and yet all over France there were unmistakable evidences of disorder and distress. It is true that trade had been largely stimulated by the issue of the Assignats; but the credit of the Assignats did not last long, and the improvement was consequently temporary and fictitious. The condition of the labouring class was still unsettled. The pressure of hunger, in spite of the abundant harvest of 1790, was still in many places keen. The middle classes, both in the towns and in the country, had clearly been great gainers by the Revolution. They had broken down the insolent ascendency of the class above them. They had secured for themselves the chief authority in the State. They were enjoying to the full the sense of their new importance--the sense that from a position of utter insignificance they had risen to be the actual rulers of the land. Thus the tradesmen, the lawyers, the prosperous artisans, the 'active citizens' of the towns, proud of their rights and places in the new Constitution, in the municipalities, in the National Guard, rejoiced in the success of the Revolution, and only regretted that it gave them so much to do; while the farmers and proprietors in the country districts, set free from the yoke of feudalism, shared the satisfaction of the bourgeois in the towns. But below these classes came another, which had no such cause for self-congratulation. The Métayers and smallest land-owners, the holders of an acre or half an acre of land, the labourers who had no land at all, had gained far less than their superiors. They had indeed escaped from the cruel burden of the old taxes, from the personal tyranny of their seigneurs, from the militia-service, from the necessity of forced labour. But they looked for more than that. They had not yet seen opened to them any path towards prosperity. The wealthy neighbours, who added to their earnings, had been scared or swept away by the Revolution. Wages were even more difficult to obtain than before. The prospect of living without hunger seemed to their troubled minds to be as distant and remote. Men who had no capital could not profit by the sale of the Church lands. Even some of those who, having a little capital, had hurried to invest it in the purchase, found too late that the bargain was a bad one, for the lands had been so much neglected that they