pupils,[4322] the two qualities of gentility and intelligence
seeming to exclude each other, as there are but four or five out of a
hundred pupils who combine the two conditions. Now, as society at
this time is mixed, such tests are frequent and easy. Whether lawyer,
physician, or man of letters, a member of the Third-Estate with whom
a duke converses familiarly, who sits in a diligence alongside of a
count-colonel of hussars,[4323] can appreciate his companion or his
interlocutor, weigh his ideas, test his merit and esteem him at his
correct value, and I am sure that he does not overrate him.--Now that
the nobles have lost their special capacities and the Third-Estate
have acquired general competence, and as they are on the same level in
education and competence, the inequality which separates them has become
offensive because it has become useless. Nobility being instituted by
custom is no longer sanctified by conscience; the Third-Estate being
justly excited against privileges that have no justification, whether in
the capacity of the noble or in the incapacity of the bourgeois.

IV. Rousseau's Philosophy Spreads And Takes HOLD.

Philosophy in the minds thus fitted for it.--That of
Rousseau prominent.--This philosophy in harmony with new
necessities.--It is adopted by the Third-Estate.

Distrust and anger against a government putting all fortunes at risk,
rancor and hostility against a nobility barring all roads to popular
advancement, are, then, the sentiments developing themselves among the
middle class solely due to their advance in wealth and culture.--We
can imagine the effect of the new philosophy upon people with such
attitudes. At first, confined to the aristocratic reservoir, the
doctrine filters out through numerous cracks like so many trickling
streams, to scatter imperceptibly among the lower class. Already, in
1727, Barbier, a bourgeois of the old school and having little knowledge
of philosophy and philosophers except the name, writes in his journal:

"A hundred poor families are deprived of the annuities on which they
supported themselves, acquired with bonds for which the capital is
obliterated; 56,000 livres are given in pensions to people who have held
the best offices, where they have amassed considerable property, always
at the expense of the people, and all this merely that they may rest
themselves and do nothing."[4324]

One by one, reformative ideas penetrate to his of