While this question was under discussion, the Viscount de Noailles and the Duke d'Aguillon, both distinguished members of the nobility, ascended the tribune and declared that it was vain to attempt to quiet the people by force, that the only way of appeasing them was by removing the cause of their sufferings. They then, though both of them members of the privileged class, nobly avowed the enormity of the aggressions under which, by the name of feudal rights, the people were oppressed, and voted for the repeal of those atrocities. It is a remarkable fact that in this great revolution the boldest and ablest friends of popular rights came out from the body of the nobles themselves. Some were influenced by as pure motives as can move the human heart. With others, perhaps, selfish and ambitious motives predominated. Among the most active in all these movements, we see La Fayette, Talleyrand, Sièyes, Mirabeau, and the Duke of Orleans. But for the aid of these men, whatever may have been the motives which influenced the one or the other, the popular cause could not have triumphed. And now we find, in the National Assembly, two of the most distinguished of the nobles rising and themselves proposing the utter abolition of all feudal rights. It was the 4th of August, 1789, when this memorable scene was enacted in the National Assembly, one of the most remarkable which ever transpired on earth. The whole body of the nobles seems to have been seized with a paroxysm of magnanimity and disinterestedness. One of the deputies of the _Tiers Etat_, M. Kerengal, in the dress of a farmer, gave a frightful picture of the sufferings of the people under feudal oppression.[199] There was no more discussion. No voice defended feudality. The nobles, one after another, renounced all their prerogatives. The clergy surrendered their tithes. The deputies of the towns and of the provinces gave up their special privileges, and, in one short night, all those customs and laws by which, for ages, one man had been robbed to enrich another were scattered to the winds. Equality of rights was established between all individuals and all parts of the French territory. Louis XVI. was then proclaimed the restorer of French liberty. It was decreed that a medal should be struck off in his honor, in memory of that glorious night. And when the Archbishop of Paris proposed that God's goodness should be acknowledged in a solemn Te Deum, to be celebrated in the king's chapel, in the presence of the king and of all the members of the National Assembly, it was carried by acclamation. During the whole of this exciting scene, when sacrifices were made such as earth never witnessed before; when nobles surrendered their titles, their pensions, and their incomes; when towns and corporations surrendered their privileges and pecuniary immunities; when prelates relinquished their tithes and their benefices; not a solitary voice of opposition or remonstrance was heard. The whole