ow
also rebels against their King. Sooner than yield an inch of the
unconscionable privileges by which too long already they have
flourished, to the misery of a whole nation, they will make a mock
of royal authority, hold up the King himself to contempt. They are
determined to prove that there is no real sovereignty in France but the
sovereignty of their own parasitic faineantise."

There was a faint splutter of applause, but the majority of the audience
remained silent, waiting.

"This is no new thing. Always has it been the same. No minister in
the last ten years, who, seeing the needs and perils of the State,
counselled the measures that we now demand as the only means of
arresting our motherland in its ever-quickening progress to the abyss,
but found himself as a consequence cast out of office by the influence
which Privilege brought to bear against him. Twice already has M. Necker
been called to the ministry, to be twice dismissed when his insistent
counsels of reform threatened the privileges of clergy and nobility. For
the third time now has he been called to office, and at last it seems
we are to have States General in spite of Privilege. But what the
privileged orders can no longer prevent, they are determined to
stultify. Since it is now a settled thing that these States General are
to meet, at least the nobles and the clergy will see to it--unless we
take measures to prevent them--by packing the Third Estate with their
own creatures, and denying it all effective representation, that they
convert the States General into an instrument of their own will for the
perpetuation of the abuses by which they live. To achieve this end they
will stop at nothing. They have flouted the authority of the King, and
they are silencing by assassination those who raise their voices to
condemn them. Yesterday in Rennes two young men who addressed the people
as I am addressing you were done to death in the streets by assassins at
the instigation of the nobility. Their blood cries out for vengeance."

Beginning in a sullen mutter, the indignation that moved his hearers
swelled up to express itself in a roar of anger.

"Citizens of Nantes, the motherland is in peril. Let us march to her
defence. Let us proclaim it to the world that we recognize that the
measures to liberate the Third Estate from the slavery in which for
centuries it has groaned find only obstacles in those orders whose
phrenetic egotism sees in the tears and suf