As a source of information on the economic and social condition of a country, the cahiers are the most wonderful collection of documents available for the historian. Many of them have been more or less faithfully published, and at the present day the French government is liberally helping on the work of making them public. But in a work of this scope it is impossible to go at length into the state of affairs which they depict; only the most salient features can be dealt with. First, then, it must be said that the cahiers present at the same time remarkable uniformity and wide divergence. The agreement lies partly in their general spirit, and partly in the repetition of certain formulas preached throughout the country by eager pamphleteers and budding political leaders. The divergence can be placed under three chief heads: the markedly different character of a great part {49} of the cahiers of the clergy from those of the other two orders; provincial divergence and peculiarities of local customs; demands for the maintenance of local privileges. Of the last class, Marseilles, a port with many commercial and political privileges, affords perhaps the most extreme example. The uniformity is to be seen especially in the general spirit of these complaints to the King. One feels, while reading the _cahiers_, the unanimity of a long-suffering people anxious for a release from intolerable misgovernment,--more than that, anxious to have their institutions modernized, but all in a spirit of complete loyalty and devotion to the King and to all that was wise, and good, and glorious, and beneficent, that he still seemed to represent. The illusion of Bourbonism was at that moment, so far as surface appearances went, practically untouched. The noblesse and the clergy conducted their elections by means of small meetings and chose their delegates from among themselves. The Tiers Etat elected as its representatives men of the upper middle class and professional class; the lower classes, ignorant and politically untutored, were unrepresented and accepted tutelage with more or less alacrity--more in the provinces, less in Paris. But in addition, a {50} small number of men belonging to the privileged orders sought and obtained mandates from the lower. Sieyes and a few other priests, Mirabeau and a few other nobles, were elected to the States-General by the Third Estate.