"If the Englishman has the greatest need of personal freedom, the Frenchman, in case of necessity, can dispense with it, if we only grant him that portion of universal liberty known as equality. The French are not a domestic, but a social, race; they are no friends to a silent _tête-à-tête_, which they call _une conversation anglaise;_ they run gossiping about from the _café_ to the casino, and from the casino to the _salons_; their light champagne-blood and inborn talent for company drive them to social life, whose first and last principle, yes, whose very soul, is equality. The development of the social principle in France necessarily involved that of equality, and if the ground of the Revolution should be sought in the Budget, it is none the less true that its language and tone were drawn from those wits of low degree who lived in the _salons_ of Paris, apparently on a footing of equality with the high _noblesse_, and who were now and then reminded, it may have been by a hardly perceptible, yet not on that account less exasperating, feudal smile, of the great and ignominious inequality which lay between them. And when the _canaille roturière_ took the liberty of beheading that high _noblesse_, it was done less to inherit their property than their ancestry, and to introduce a noble equality in place of a vulgar inequality. And we are the better authorized to believe that this striving for equality was the main principle of the Revolution, since the French speedily found themselves so happy and contented under the dominion of their great Emperor, who, fully appreciating that they were not yet of age, kept all their _freedom_ within the limits of his powerful guardianship, permitting them only the pleasure of a perfect and admirable equality.