hich the vast mass of the French people lived,
struggled, suffered, and died were so cruel that it is hard indeed to
believe them compatible with the high degree of civilization which, in
other respects, France had reached. A merciless and most comprehensive
process of taxation squeezed life and hope out of the French nation {292}
for the benefit of a nobility whose corruption was only rivalled by its
worthlessness and an ecclesiasticism that had forgotten the Sermon on the
Mount and the way to Calvary.

But if the condition of France was bad it contained the germs of
improvement. A greater freedom of thought, a greater freedom of speech
were beginning, very gradually, to assert themselves and to make their
influence felt. Philosophical speculation on sorrow and suffering turned
the minds of men to thoughts of how that sorrow might be stanched and
that suffering abated. The slowly rising tide of thought was blown into
an angry sea by a wind from the west, and in a little while a scarcely
suspected storm became a hurricane that swept into a common ruin
everything that opposed its fury. England had long been looked up to by
French reformers as the pattern for the changes they desired to see
brought about in their own country. The moderation and equality of its
laws, as compared with those of France, the facilities of utterance
afforded to the popular voice, made it seem a veritable Utopia to eyes
dimmed by the mist of French feudality. But now another and a greater
England had arisen in the New World. Across the Atlantic the descendants
of the men who had overthrown a dynasty and beheaded a king had shaken
themselves free from forms of oppression that seemed mild indeed to
Frenchmen, and had proclaimed themselves the champions of theories of
social liberty and political freedom which had been dreamed of by French
philosophers but had never yet been put into practice. Rebellious
America had fired the enthusiasm of gallant French adventurers;
successful, independent America animated the hopes and spurred the
imaginations of those whose eyes turned in longing admiration from the
seasoned constitution of monarchical England to the as yet green
constitution of republican America.

[Sidenote: 1789--Revival of the States-General in France]

Those Englishmen whose tastes and sympathies induced them to keep in
touch with political opinion in France, and to watch with interest the
spread of ideas which they themselves he