n heavy horses sheathed in armor, trod under foot 8 or 10
millions of naked men, the ancestors of the actual nation. Behold
these well-established claims to the respect and affection of their
descendants! And, to complete the respectability of this nobility, it
is recruited and regenerated by the adoption of those who have acquired
fortune by plundering the cabins of the poor who are unable to pay its
impositions."[4343]--

"Why should not the Third-Estate send back," says Sieyes, "into the
forests of Franconia every family that maintains its absurd pretension
of having sprung from the loins of a race of conquerors, and of having
succeeded to the rights of conquest? [4344] I can well imagine, were
there no police, every Cartouche[4345] firmly establishing himself on
the high-road--would that give him a right to levy toll? Suppose him
to sell a monopoly of this kind, once common enough, to an honest
successor, would the right become any more respectable in the hands of
the purchaser?. . . Every privilege, in its nature, is unjust, odious,
and against the social compact. The blood boils at the thought of its
ever having been possible to legally consecrate down to the eighteenth
century the abominable fruits of an abominable feudal system. . . . The
caste of nobles is really a population apart, a fraudulent population,
however, which, for lack of serviceable faculties, and unable to exist
alone, fastens itself upon a living nation, like the vegetable tumors
that support themselves on the sap of the plants to which they are a
burden, and which wither beneath the load."--They suck all, everything
being for them. "Every branch of the executive power has fallen into the
hands of this caste, which staffed (already) the church, the robe and
the sword. A sort of confraternity or joint paternity leads the nobles
each to prefer the other and all to the rest of the nation. . . . The
Court reigns, and not the monarch. The Court creates and distributes
offices. And what is the Court but the head of this vast aristocracy
that covers all parts of France, and which, through its members, attains
to and exercises everywhere whatever is requisite in all branches of the
public administration?"--Let us put an end to "this social crime, this
long parricide which one class does itself the honor to commit daily
against the others. . . . Ask no longer what place the privileged shall
occupy in the social order; it is simply asking what place in a s