"My dear, I wished to make the people happier than they were before. I wanted money to pay the expenses of our great wars. I asked it of the parliament, as the kings of France have always done before. The magistrates who composed the parliament were unwilling, and said that the people alone had a right to consent that this money should be given. I called together at Versailles the principal people of every town, distinguished by their rank, their fortune, or their talents. These were called the States-General. When they were assembled, they required of me things which I could not do, either for my own sake or yours; as you are to be king after me. Wicked persons have appeared, causing the people to rebel; and the shocking things that have happened lately are their doing. We must blame them and not the people." So spoke Louis the Sixteenth to his young son: and from these words (among other evidence) we learn how little he was aware of the true causes and nature of the great Revolution which was taking place. It appears that he really thought this revolution was owing to the acts of the last few months, and not to the long course of grinding oppression which had begun hundreds of years before he was born. He believed that the violence he witnessed was owing to the malice of a few "wicked persons," and not to the exasperation of a nation,--the fury of many millions of sufferers against a few hundreds of the rich and powerful. This was not the first time of the king's showing how little he understood of what was taking place and what ought to be done. When it was absolutely necessary to the peace of the kingdom to have a minister who would relieve the people of the heaviest taxes, the king removed such a minister, and thought he was doing what he could to make up for this, by retrenching some expenses in the palace. For instance, it had always been the custom for the two first bed-chamber women of the queen to have for their own all the wax-lights placed daily in the whole suite of royal apartments, whether lighted or not. These they sold for many hundred pounds a year. When the king began to retrench, he took from these women the wax-light privilege; and the candles which were not lighted one evening served for the next. The ladies were not pleased at being thus deprived of a large part of their income; but this, with the few other retrenchments made by the royal family, was right. All these retrenchments were nothing, however, in comparison with what was wanted. The peasantry still had to pay the grievous land-tax, even when they were reduced to eat boiled nettles and grass. The poor still had to buy the quantity of dear salt ordered by law, even when they had no meat to eat it with. The labouring man and his sons, weakened by hunger and spent with toil, still had to turn out and work upon the roads, without wages, while wife and young children were growing savage with want in their ruined hut.