g to pass what we in the nineteenth, and after all the advances of
the French nation, have not yet succeeded in getting accomplished, to
wit, the government of the country by the country itself. Marcel, going
from excess to excess and from reverse to reverse in the pursuit of his
impracticable enterprise, found himself before long engaged in a fierce
struggle with the feudal aristocracy, still so powerful at that time, as
well as with the kingship. Being reduced to depend entirely during this
struggle upon such strength as could be supplied by a municipal democracy
incoherent, inexperienced, and full of divisions in its own ranks, and by
a mad insurrection in the country districts, he rapidly fell into the
selfish and criminal condition of the man whose special concern is his
own personal safety. This he sought to secure by an unworthy alliance
with the most scoundrelly amongst his ambitious contemporaries, and he
would have given up his own city as well as France to the King of Navarre
and the English had not another burgher of Paris, John Maillart, stopped
him, and put him to death at the very moment when the patriot of the
states-general of 1355 was about to become a traitor to his country.
Hardly thirteen years before, when Stephen Marcel was already a
full-grown man, the great Flemish burgher, James Van Artevelde, had,
in the cause of his country's liberties, attempted a similar enterprise,
and, after a series of great deeds at the outset and then of faults also
similar to those of Marcel, had fallen into the same abyss, and had
perished by the hand of his fellow-citizens, at the very moment when he
was laboring to put Flanders, his native country, into the hands of a
foreign master, the Prince of Wales, son of Edward III., King of England.
Of all political snares the democratic is the most tempting, but it is
also the most demoralizing and the most deceptive when, instead of
consulting the interests of the democracy by securing public liberties, a
man aspires to put it in direct possession of the supreme power, and with
its sole support to take upon himself the direction of the helm.

One single result of importance was won for France by the states-general
of the fourteenth century, namely, the principle of the nation's right to
intervene in their own affairs, and to set their government straight when
it had gone wrong or was incapable of performing that duty itself. Up to
that time, in the thirteenth century an