The real truth about his subjects was, though Louis did not know it, that their state was as utterly miserable as that of human beings well could be. They were ground down not only by their local lords and nobles, but also by the heavy taxes that they had to contribute in order that the king should be able to keep up this magnificence in his court, to pay so large an army and to wage costly wars. It was no part of the French constitution, as of the English, that the money supplied for the purposes of government should be voted by the Parliament. It is true that English kings often tried, sometimes successfully, to extract such money without a vote of Parliament; but at least the law was there, for the people to appeal to, as a great fact in the English constitution. Its existence made a very great difference. Thus, while all went so gloriously with France upon the surface and in the upper ranks, below, in those foundations on which, after all, this splendid edifice was based, there was misery and increasing poverty--poverty which could have only one end, that there would be no money to pay for the wars and for the magnificence, and misery so intolerable that men would rise and revolt against their conditions of life, no matter how many should perish in the revolution. We, now, knowing what actually did come to pass, can see how the forces were slowly accumulating which would {98} bring it all about. But from the eyes of men of that time, living in the midst of it, the end was hidden; and most of all, as we may suppose, hidden from that resplendent monarch himself. We may observe as curious that in the varying struggle that we have seen going on between France, Spain, England, and Holland during this half-century, we hear so little of Germany taking a hand. Certain of the German States did, as a matter of fact, play some small part, directly, in that struggle, either as Protestants in alliance with the Protestant Dutch, or later in their own defence against the claims of the French king; but the reason why Germany, as a whole, took no continuous or large share, by direct action at the centre, was in the first place that her power was much broken up--she was split into a number of separate States, with no strong central authority to combine their action; secondly, that indirectly she really was playing a part that was important--serving as a guard to keep back the Turk on the south-eastern corner of Europe.