and they saw falling
down on all sides the boundaries which they had considered sacred. They
saw pioneers, as bold as they were thoughtless, marching through the
mists of a glorious hope towards an unknown future, attacking errors and
abuses, all the while that they were digging up the groundwork of society
in order to lay new foundations, and they must have shuddered even in
their everlasting rest to see ideas taking the place of creeds, doubt
substituted for belief, generous aspirations after liberty, justice, and
humanity mingled, amongst the masses, with low passions and deep-seated
rancor. They saw respect disappearing, the church as well as the kingly
power losing prestige every day, religious faith all darkened and dimmed
in some corner of men's souls, and, amidst all this general instability,
they asked themselves with awe, "What are the guiding-reins of the
society which is about to be? What will be the props of the new fabric?
The foundations are overturned; what will the good man do?"

[Illustration: Montesquieu----269]

Good men had themselves sometimes lent a hand to the work, beyond what
they had intended or foreseen, perhaps; Montesquieu, despite the wise
moderation of his great and strong mind, had been the first to awaken
that yearning for novelty and reforms which had been silently brooding at
the bottom of men's hearts. Born in 1689 at the castle of La Brede, near
Bordeaux, Montesquieu really belonged, in point of age, to the reign of
Louis XIV., of which he bears the powerful imprint even amidst the
boldness of his thoughts and expressions. Grandeur is the distinctive
characteristic of Montesquieu's ideas, as it is of the seventeenth
century altogether. He was already councillor in the Parliament of
Bordeaux when Louis XIV. died; next year (1716) he took possession of a
mortar-cap president's (_president d mortier_) office, which had been
given up to him by one of his uncles. "On leaving college," he says,
"there were put into my hands some law-books; I examined the spirit of
them." Those profound researches, which were to last as long as his
life, were more suited to his tastes than jurisprudence properly so
called. "What has always given me rather a low opinion of myself," he
would say, "is that there are very few positions in the commonwealth for
which I should be really fit. As for my office of president, I have my
heart in the right place, I comprehend sufficiently well the questions i