would be discharged in cash. A very
large part of the national debt was held in the form of annuities for
lives, and men who had invested their savings on the credit of the
government, saw themselves left without a provision. The total number of
fundholders cannot be ascertained with any precision, but it must have
been very considerable, especially in Paris and the other great cities.
Add to these all the civil litigants in the kingdom, who had portions of
their property virtually sequestrated by the suspension of the courts
into which the property had been taken. The resentment of this immense
body of defrauded public creditors and injured private suitors explains
the alienation of the middle class from the monarchy. In the convulsions
of our own time, the moneyed interests have been on one side, and the
population without money on the other. But in the first and greatest
convulsion, those who had nothing to lose found their animosities shared
by those who had had something to lose, and had lost it.

Deliberative assemblies, then, had been tried, and ministers had been
tried; both had failed, and there was no other device left, except one
which was destructive to absolute monarchy. Lewis the Sixteenth was in
1789 in much the same case as that of the King of England in 1640.
Charles had done his best to raise money without any parliament for
twelve years: he had lost patience with the Short Parliament; finally,
he was driven without choice or alternative to face as he best could the
stout resolution and the wise patriotism of the Long Parliament. Men
sometimes wonder how it was that Lewis, when he came to find the
National Assembly unmanageable, and discovering how rapidly he was
drifting towards the thunders of the revolutionary cataract, did not
break up a Chamber over which neither the court, nor even a minister so
popular as Necker, had the least control. It is a question whether the
sword would not have broken in his hand. Even supposing, however, that
the army would have consented to a violent movement against the
Assembly, the King would still have been left in the same desperate
straits from which he had looked to the States-General to extricate him.
He might perhaps have dispersed the Assembly; he could not disperse debt
and deficit. Those monsters would have haunted him as implacably as
ever. There was no new formula of exorcism, nor any untried enchantment.
The success of violent designs against the National