So far all was well, but at another point the constituent assembly stumbled. They were not bold enough to give full _political_ rights. They thought the peasantry too ignorant--too much debased by a long servitude, to be entrusted with political rights,--therefore they denied them, and invented for them "passive citizenship."[53] It was skillfully devised, but none the less fatal. The denial of political rights to the enfranchised was one of the two great causes of the destruction of the Constitution of 1791, and of the inauguration of the Reign of Terror. Political rights could not be refused long. As they could not be obtained in peace the freed peasantry never allowed France rest until it gained them by long years of bloodshed and anarchy. Revolution after revolution has failed of full results. Dynasty after dynasty has failed to give quiet until a great statesman in our own time, Napoleon III., has been bold enough to make suffrage universal. Whatever the first French Revolution failed to do, it failed to do mainly by lack of bold faith in giving _political_ rights;--whatever it succeeded in doing, it succeeded by giving full _civil_ rights. When Louis XVIII. was brought back by foreign bayonets, the nobility also came back jubilant; all seemed about to give France over to her old caste of oppressors. The revolution was gone, its great theories were gone, its great men were swept away by death and by discouragement worse than death. But one barrier stood between France and all her old misery. That barrier stood firm; it was the enfranchised peasantry--possessing civil rights and confiscated property in land. Against these the whole might of the nobility beat in vain. Peace came, and with peace prosperity. France had been fearfully shattered by ages of evil administration and false political economy; she had been devastated by wars without and within; she had been plundered of an immense indemnity by the allies; the best of her people had been swept off by conscriptions; but under the distribution of lands to the former serfs, and the full guarantee of civil rights and the germs of political rights, the nation showed an energy in recuperation and a breadth of prosperity never before known in all her history. There are other nations which, did time allow, might be summoned before us to aid our insight into the tendencies of castes habituated to oppression. I might show from the annals of Germany how such a caste, having dragged the country through a thousand years of anarchy, have left it in chronic disunion,--the loss of all natural consideration, and oft-recurring civil wars, one of which is now devastating her.[54]