clergy, of the nobility, of the commons. What
without their exertions would be the value of the tithes and great
possessions of the Church, of the splendid estates of the nobility, or
of our own house-rents and inheritances? With their bones scarcely
skinned over, your wretched people present themselves before you, beaten
down and helpless, with the aspect rather of death itself than of living
men, imploring your succor in the name of Him who has appointed you to
reign over them--who made you a man, that you might be merciful to other
men--and who made you the father of your subjects, that you might be
compassionate to these your helpless children. If your majesty shall not
take means for that end, I fear lest despair should teach the sufferers
that a soldier is, after all, nothing more than a peasant bearing arms;
and lest, when the vine-dresser shall have taken up his arquebuse, he
should cease to become an anvil only that he may become a hammer."

After this the Third Estate demanded the convocation of a general
assembly every ten years, a more just distribution of taxes, equality of
all before the law, the suppression of interior custom-houses, the
abolition of sundry sinecures held by nobles, the forbidding to leading
nobles of unauthorized levies of soldiery, some stipulations regarding
the working clergy and the non-residence of bishops; and in the midst of
all these demands, as a gold grain amid husks, they placed a demand for
the emancipation of the serfs.

But these demands were sneered at. The idea of the natural equality in
rights of all men--the idea of the personal worth of every man--the idea
that rough-clad workers have prerogatives which can be whipped out by no
smooth-clad idlers--these ideas were as far beyond serf-owners of those
days as they were beyond slave-owners of our own days. Nothing was done.
Augustin Thierry is authority for the statement that the clergy were
willing to yield something. The nobles would yield nothing. The
different orders quarrelled until one March morning in 1615, when, on
going to their hall, they were barred out and told that the workmen were
fitting the place for a court ball. And so the deputies separated--to
all appearance no new work was done, no new ideas enforced, no strong
men set loose.

So it was in seeming; so it was not in reality. Something had been done.
That assembly planted ideas in the French mind which struck more and
more deeply, and spread more and