ll their
misfortunes.

"The partition of Poland revealed to the French the political
degradation of their country. The great and beautiful kingdom of France
resembled a planet under eclipse: its light seemed extinguished. The
French honour felt itself profoundly mortified. In the midst of that
degradation, and from its very effects, political combinations entered
more and more into every thought. The activity of mind, which no longer
could find employment in the glory of the country, took a direction
towards industry and the sciences. The middle class, rich and
instructed, obtained an influence which formerly had been monopolised by
the _noblesse_, and aspired to the destruction of privileges which it
did not enjoy. Beneath both, the working classes, steeped in misery,
crushed under the weight of taxes, reserved to the innovators the most
formidable support.

"Thus the movement, arising from many different causes, extended more
and more. The philosophers, by incessantly depreciating the nation in
their writings, had succeeded in rendering the nation ashamed of itself.
All parties in the nation seemed to unite in deeming it necessary to
destroy the ancient social order. It was manifest that important changes
would take place at no distant period, though the exact time of their
approach could not be fixed with certainty. It was at the approach of
that tempest which was destined to shake the state to its foundations,
that the pride of philosophy sought to exalt itself by attacking heaven.
By it the curb of conscience was broken, and the great name of God,
which might have imposed a restraint on the violence of the passions
which the Revolution called forth, was effaced. By this means, to the
legitimate conquest of liberty will ere long succeed a mortal strife of
vanities, in which those of the majority, having proved victorious, will
stain themselves without mercy with the blood of the vanquished. Other
people will, in future times, undergo changes similar to ours; but they
will eschew the same violence, because the influence of religion will
not be extinct among them. Posterity, that equitable judge of the past,
imputes to philosophy that it perverted the minds of the people while it
pretended to enlighten them, and turned aside from its proper end a
revolution commenced with the design of ameliorating the lot of the
human race.

"Louis XV. left royalty tarnished in France. At his death the people
rejoiced,--the enlig