When in 1770 the Parliament of Paris was broken, the magistrates who belonged to it submitted to the loss of their profession and their power without a single instance of any individual yielding to the will of the sovereign. Nay, more, some Courts of a different kind, such as the Court of Aids, which were neither affected nor menaced, voluntarily exposed themselves to the same harsh treatment, when that treatment had become certain. Nor is this all: the leading advocates who practised before the Parliament resolved of their own accord to share its fortune; they renounced all that made their glory and their wealth, and condemned themselves to silence rather than appear before dishonoured judges. I know of nothing in the history of free nations grander than what occurred on this occasion, and yet this happened in the eighteenth century, hard by the court of Louis XV. The habits of the French Courts of justice had become in many respects the habits of the nation. The Courts of justice had given birth to the notion that every question was open to discussion and every decision subject to appeal, and likewise to the use of publicity, and to a taste for forms of proceeding--things adverse to servitude: this was the only part of the education of a free people which the institutions of the old monarchy had given to France. The administration itself had borrowed largely from the language and the practice of the Courts. The King considered himself obliged to assign motives for his edicts, and to state his reasons before he drew the conclusion; the Council of State caused its orders to be preceded by long preambles; the Intendants promulgated their ordinances in the forms of judicial procedure. In all the administrative bodies of any antiquity, such, for example, as the body of the Treasurers of France or that of the _élus_ (who assessed the _taille_), the cases were publicly debated and decided after argument at the bar. All these usages, all these formalities, were so many barriers to the arbitrary power of the sovereign. The people alone, applying that term to the lower orders of society, and especially the people of the rural districts, were almost always unable to offer any resistance to oppression except by violence. Most of the means of defence which I have here passed in review were, in fact, beyond their reach; to employ those means, a place in society where they could be seen, or a voice loud enough to make itself heard, was requisite; But above the ranks of the lower orders there was not a man in France who, if he had the courage, might not contest his obedience and resist in giving way.