were suffered to be well off. The
Chancellor affirmed that France could not be governed without the right
of arbitrary arrest and exile; and that in case of danger to the State
it may be well that a hundred innocent men should perish. The Minister
of Finance called it sedition to demand that the Crown should keep
faith. One who lived on intimate terms with Louis XIV. says that even
the slightest disobedience to the royal will is a crime to be punished
with death. Louis employed these precepts to their fullest extent. He
candidly avows that kings are no more bound by the terms of a treaty
than by the words of a compliment; and that there is nothing in the
possession of their subjects which they may not lawfully take from them.
In obedience to this principle, when Marshal Vauban, appalled by the
misery of the people, proposed that all existing imposts should be
repealed for a single tax that would be less onerous, the King took his
advice, but retained all the old taxes whilst he imposed the new. With
half the present population, he maintained an army of 450,000 men;
nearly twice as large as that which the late Emperor Napoleon assembled
to attack Germany. Meanwhile the people starved on grass. France, said
Fenelon, is one enormous hospital. French historians believe that in a
single generation six millions of people died of want. It would be easy
to find tyrants more violent, more malignant, more odious than Louis
XIV., but there was not one who ever used his power to inflict greater
suffering or greater wrong; and the admiration with which he inspired
the most illustrious men of his time denotes the lowest depth to which
the turpitude of absolutism has ever degraded the conscience of Europe.

The Republics of that day were, for the most part, so governed as to
reconcile men with the less opprobrious vices of monarchy. Poland was a
State made up of centrifugal forces. What the nobles called liberty was
the right of each of them to veto the acts of the Diet, and to persecute
the peasants on his estates--rights which they refused to surrender up
to the time of the partition, and thus verified the warning of a
preacher spoken long ago: "You will perish, not by invasion or war, but
by your infernal liberties." Venice suffered from the opposite evil of
excessive concentration. It was the most sagacious of Governments, and
would rarely have made mistakes if it had not imputed to others motives
as wise as its own, and had taken