In the _Ancien Regime_ we see the seeds of all that is worst and most dangerous in the modern French polity: the hothouse which fostered into a growth, unknown elsewhere, that passion of envy, which Tocqueville regards as the radical vice, the paramount impulse, the fundamental principle, of Democracy. The peculiar reasons for this dominant sentiment of hatred and jealousy in the democracy of France will be found in his own writings. Much as there was to admire in the old nobility of France, the people saw it only in an aspect calculated to excite unmingled hatred and contempt. It had ceased to govern, to render any service in return for privileges, exemptions, and exactions so odious, vexatious, and oppressive that no service could atone for them. Even these were forgiven to the resident aristocracy of La Vendee. But absentees supported by such exactions, an Order known to the people not even by neglected duties and ill-directed interference, but solely by demands and extortions unconnected with any remaining or remembered functions, a class whose wealth and luxury were supported not by rents or other returns paid by the tillers of the soil to its original owners, holders, or 'lords,' but by rates, tithes, fines, heriots, monopolies (to use the nearest English equivalents) levied for their benefit, and levied in the worst possible way--what feelings could these excite among a people consciously fainting beneath the load of taxes, _corvees_, restrictions and imposts, fees and stamps, of which only a part ever reached the empty Treasury of the State? Is it strange that so monstrous a fabric, when those on whose living bodies it was built rose in revolt, should have fallen with a great ruin, and have crushed all whom it had sheltered? 'The guilt of an Order cannot palliate the massacre of its Innocents.' True; but human nature being what it is, the unreasoning burst of fury which strove to stamp out every trace of old institutions, to exterminate the race of the unconscious oppressors, was less strange than the fidelity of the Vendeans.