sis, by devoting himself
solely to financial arrangements, and omitting to take, on the part of the
crown, the initiative in any one of the reforms which the king had
promised. Those he permitted to be intrusted to a committee of the
Assembly; and the committee had scarcely met when the Assembly took the
matter into its own hands; and in a strange panic, and at a single
sitting, swept away the privileges of both Nobles and clergy, those who
seemed personally most concerned in their maintenance being the foremost
in urging their suppression. A member of the oldest nobility proposed the
abolition of the privileges of the Nobles. A bishop moved the extinction
of tithes; Bretons, Burgundians, Provencals, renounced for their fellow-
citizens the old distinctions and immunities to which each province had
hitherto clung with an unyielding if somewhat unreasoning attachment; and
the whole was crowned by the Archbishop of Paris proposing a celebration
of the _Te Deum_, as an expression of gratitude to God for having inspired
a series of actions calculated to confer so much happiness on the nation.

Though he could not avoid seeing the mischievous character of many of the
resolutions thus tumultuously passed, and though his royal assent to them
was asked in language unceremonious and almost peremptory in its curtness,
Louis could not bring himself, or perhaps did not venture, to refuse his
sanction to them. He had laid down a rule for himself to refuse no
concession except such as on religious grounds his conscience might revolt
from; and on the 18th he signified his formal acceptance of the
resolutions, and of the title of "Restorer of French Liberty." It was an
act of great weakness, and was rewarded, as such acts generally are, by
further encroachments on his authority. The progress of the Left was not
even arrested by a quarrel between some of its members (who, being
clergymen, were not inclined to be reduced to beggary by the extinction of
their incomes), and Mirabeau, who, not unnaturally, bore the priests
especial ill-will. Before the end of the month, the Assembly even deprived
the king of the power of withholding his assent from measures which it
might pass, enacting that he should no longer possess an absolute "veto,"
as it was called, and Necker, exhibiting on this question an incapacity
more glaring than even his former conduct had displayed, induced the king
to yield this point also; and to express his own preference f