e experiments;
all have failed; there is no historical continuity between any of
them. Charles the Great gathered his Great Council around him year by
year; his successors in the Eastern _Francia_, the Kings of the
Teutonic Kingdom, went on doing so long afterwards. But in Gaul, in
Western _Francia_, after it fell away from the common centre, no such
assembly could be gathered together. The kingdom split into fragments;
every province did what was right in its own eyes; Aquitaine and
Toulouse had neither fear nor love enough for their nominal King to
contribute any members to a Council of his summoning. Philip the Fair,
for his own convenience, summoned the States-General. But the
States-General were no historical continuation of the old Frankish
Assemblies; they were a new institution of his own, devised, it maybe,
in imitation of the English Parliament or of the Spanish Cortes. From
that time the French States-General ran a brilliant and a fitful
course. Very different indeed were they from the homely Parliaments of
England. Our stout knights and citizens were altogether guiltless of
political theories. They had no longing after great and comprehensive
measures. But if they saw any practical abuses in the land, the King
could get no money out of them till he set matters right again. If
they saw a bad law, they demanded its alteration; if they saw a wicked
minister, they demanded his dismissal. It is this sort of bit-by-bit
reform, going on for six hundred years, which has saved us alike from
magnificent theories and from massacres in the cause of humanity. Both
were as familiar in France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
as ever they were at the close of the eighteenth. The demands of the
States-General, and of what we may call the liberal party in France
generally, throughout those two centuries, are as wide in their
extent, and as neatly expressed, as any modern constitution from 1791
to 1848. But while the English Parliament, meeting year after year,
made almost every year some small addition or other to the mass of our
liberties, the States-General, meeting only now and then, effected
nothing lasting, and gradually sank into as complete disuse as the old
Frankish Assemblies. By the time of the revolution of 1789, their
constitution and mode of proceeding had become matters of antiquarian
curiosity. Of later attempts, National Assemblies, National
Conventions, Chambers of Deputies, we need not speak. They ha