thinkers in France.
Within five years from the time when the American army was disbanded
French political philosophy found itself making astonishing strides
towards the realization of its cherished ideals. It had long felt the
need of some change in the system of government that had prevailed in
France, but its desires had seemed dim as dreams until the success of a
handful of rebellious colonists in a distant country had made the spirit
of democracy an immediate force in the life and the thought of the world.
Undoubtedly the condition of France was bad. {291} The feudal system, or
what was left of the feudal system, worn out, degraded, and corrupt, was
rapidly reducing France to financial, physical, and political ruin. It
is no part of the business of this history to dwell upon the conditions
prevailing in France towards the close of the eighteenth century,
conditions which prevailed in varying degree over the most part of
Europe. Great French financiers like Turgot, great French thinkers like
Voltaire and Rousseau and the company of the "Encyclopaedia," had been
keenly conscious of the corroding evils in the whole system of French
political and social life, and had labored directly and indirectly to
diminish them. Keen-eyed observers from abroad, men of the world like
Chesterfield, philosophers like Arthur Young, had at different epochs
observed the symptoms of social disease and prognosticated the nature of
its progress. The France of that day has been likened to a pyramid with
the sovereign for its apex, with the nobility, a remnant of antique
feudalism, for its next tier, with the wealthy and influential Church for
the next, and below these the vast unrecognized bulk of the pyramid, the
unprivileged masses who were the people of France. In the hands of the
few who had the happiness to be "born," or who otherwise belonged to the
privileged orders, lay all the power, all the authority which for the
most part they misused or abused. It has been said with truth that the
man who did not belong to the privileged orders had scarcely any more
influence upon the laws which bound him and which ground him than if he
lived in Mars or Saturn instead of in Picardy or Franche Comte. Such a
system of government, which could only have been found tolerable if it
had been swayed by a brotherhood of saints and sages, was, as a matter of
fact, worked in the worst manner possible and for the worst purposes.
The conditions under w