al origin and nature of the event. It
was the deficit; it was the famine; it was the Austrian Committee; it
was the Diamond Necklace, and the humiliating memories of the Seven
Years' War; it was the pride of nobles or the intolerance of priests;
it was philosophy; it was freemasonry; it was Mr. Pitt; it was the
incurable levity and violence of the national character; it was the
issue of that struggle between classes that constitutes the unity of
the history of France.

Amongst these interpretations we shall have to pick our way; but there
are many questions of detail on which I shall be forced to tell you
that I have no deciding evidence.

* * * * *

After the contemporary memoirs, the first historian who wrote with
authority was Droz. He was at work for thirty years, having begun in
1811, when Paris was still full of floating information, and he knew
much that otherwise did not come out until long after his death. He
had consulted Lally Tollendal, and he was allowed to use the memoirs
of Malouet, which were in manuscript, and which are unsurpassed for
wisdom and good faith in the literature of the National Assembly. Droz
was a man of sense and experience, with a true if not a powerful mind;
and his book, in point of soundness and accuracy, was all that a book
could be in the days when it was written. It is a history of Lewis
XVI. during the time when it was possible to bring the Revolution
under control; and the author shows, with an absolute sureness of
judgment, that the turning-point was the rejection of the first
project of Constitution, in September 1789. For him, the Revolution is
contained in the first four months. He meant to write a political
treatise on the natural history of revolutions, and the art of so
managing just demands that unjust and dangerous demands shall acquire
no force. It became a history of rejected opportunities, and an
indictment of the wisdom of the minister and of the goodness of the
king, by a constitutional royalist of the English school. His service
to history is that he shows how disorder and crime grew out of
unreadiness, want of energy, want of clear thought and definite
design. Droz admits that there is a flaw in the philosophy of his
title-page. The position lost in the summer of 1789 was never
recovered. But during the year 1790 Mirabeau was at work on schemes
to restore the monarchy, and it is not plain that they could never
have succeeded. The