there was nobody in authority over them, nobody to keep
peace between them.

The first effect of the taking of the Bastille, the effacement of
royalty, the suspension of the ministerial office, was the rising of
the cottage against the castle, of the injured peasant against the
privileged landlord, who, apart from any fault of his own, by
immemorial process of history and by the actual letter of the law, was
his perpetual and inevitable enemy. The events of the week between
July 11 and 17 proclaimed that the authorised way to obtain what you
wanted was to employ the necessary violence. If it was thorough and
quick enough, there would be no present resistance, and no subsequent
complaint. And if there was some excess in the way of cruelty and
retribution, it was sure of amnesty on the ground of intolerable
provocation and of suffering endured too long. The king had accepted
his own humiliation as if it had been as good as due to him. He could
not do more for others than for himself. His brief alliance with the
aristocracy was dissolved. He was powerless for their defence, as they
were for their own. By their formal act of submission to the Assembly
on July 16, they acknowledged that their cause was lost with the
Bastille. They neglected to make terms with the enemy at their homes.

The appalling thing in the French Revolution is not the tumult but the
design. Through all the fire and smoke we perceive the evidence of
calculating organisation. The managers remain studiously concealed and
masked; but there is no doubt about their presence from the first.
They had been active in the riots of Paris, and they were again active
in the provincial rising. The remnant of the upper classes formed a
powerful minority at Versailles; and if they acted as powerful
minorities do, if they entered into compacts and combinations, they
could compound for the loss of fiscal immunity by the salvation of
social privilege. The people would continue to have masters--masters,
that is, not of their own making. They would be subject to powers
instituted formerly, whilst the Government itself obtained its
credentials for the day, and there would still be an intermediate body
between the nation and the sovereign. Wealth artificially constituted,
by means of laws favouring its accumulation in a class, and
discouraging its dispersion among all, would continue to predominate.

France might be transformed after the likeness of England; but the
very e