fter the Revolution had fairly begun,'
as a contemporary says, 'that they sought in Mably and Rousseau for
arms to sustain the system towards which the effervescence of some
hardy spirits was dragging affairs. It was not the above-named
authors who set people's heads aflame. M. Necker alone produced this
effect, and determined the explosion.'[6]

[6] Senac de Meilhan, _Du Gouvernement en France_, 129, etc. (1795).

The predominance of a historic, instead of an abstract, school of
political thought could have saved nothing. It could have saved
nothing, because the historic or conservative organs and elements of
society were incompetent to realise those progressive ideas which
were quite as essential to social continuity as the historic ideas.
The historic method in political action is only practicable on
condition that some, at any rate, of the great established bodies
have the sap of life in their members. In France not even the
judiciary, usually the last to part from its ancient roots, was
sound and quick. 'The administration of justice,' says Arthur Young,
'was partial, venal, infamous. The conduct of the parliament was
profligate and atrocious. The bigotry, ignorance, false principles,
and tyranny of these bodies were generally conspicuous.'[7] We know
what the court was, we know what the noblesse was, and this is what
the third great leading order in the realm was. We repeat, then,
that the historic doctrine could get no fulcrum or leverage, and
that only the revolutionary doctrine, which the eighteenth century
had got ready for the crisis, was adequate to the task of social
renovation.

[7] _Travels in France_, i. 603.

Again, we venture to put to M. Taine the following question. If the
convulsions of 1789-1794 were due to the revolutionary doctrine, if
that doctrine was the poison of the movement, how would he explain
the firm, manly, steadfast, unhysterical quality of the American
Revolution thirteen years before? It was theoretically based on
exactly the same doctrine. Jefferson and Franklin were as well
disciplined in the French philosophy of the eighteenth century as
Mirabeau or Robespierre. The Declaration of Independence recites the
same abstract and unhistoric propositions as the Declaration of the
Rights of Man. Why are we to describe the draught which Rousseau and
the others had brewed, as a harmless or wholesome prescription for
the Americans, and as maddening poison to the French? The answer
must