eater share than was ever formerly allowed to them in the
fortunes of men. The third estate of the old regimen exists no more; it
disappeared in its victory over privilege and absolute power; it has for
heirs the middle classes, as they are now called; but these classes,
whilst inheriting the conquests of the old third estate, hold them on new
conditions also, as legitimate as binding. To secure their own
interests, as well as to discharge their public duty, they are bound to
be at once conservative and liberal; they must, on the one hand, enlist
and rally beneath their flag the old, once privileged superioritics,
which have survived the fall of the old regimen, and, on the other hand,
fully recognize the continual upward movement which is fermenting in the
whole body of the nation. That, in its relations with the aristocratic
classes, the third estate of the old regimen should have been and for a
long time remained uneasy, disposed to take umbrage, jealous and even
envious, is no more than natural; it had its rights to urge and its
conquests to gain; nowadays its conquests have been won, the rights are
recognized, proclaimed, and exercised; the middle classes have no longer
any legitimate ground for uneasiness or envy; they can rest with full
confidence in their own dignity and their own strength; they have
undergone all the necessary trials, and passed all the necessary tests.
In respect of the lower orders, and the democracy properly so called, the
position of the middle classes is no less favorable; they have no fixed
line of separation; for who can say where the middle classes begin and
where they end? In the name of the principles of common rights and
general liberty they were formed; and by the working of the same
principles they are being constantly recruited, and are incessantly
drawing new vigor from the sources whence they sprang. To maintain
common rights and free movement upwards against the retrograde tendencies
of privilege and absolute power, on the one hand, and on the other
against the insensate and destructive pretensions of levellers and
anarchists, is now the double business of the middle classes; and it is
at the same time, for themselves, the sure way of preserving
preponderance in the state, in the name of general interests, of which
those classes are the most real and most efficient representatives.

On reaching, in our history, the period at which Philip the Handsome, by
giving admission am