good that they had educated us into a capacity for better institutions.
There is not a large town in the kingdom which does not contain better
materials for a legislature than all France could furnish in 1789. There
is not a spouting-club at any pot-house in London in which the rules of
debate are not better understood, and more strictly observed, than in
the Constituent Assembly. There is scarcely a Political Union which
could not frame in half an hour a declaration of rights superior to that
which occupied the collective wisdom of France for several months.

It would be impossible even to glance at all the causes of the French
Revolution within the limits to which we must confine ourselves. One
thing is clear. The government, the aristocracy, and the church were
rewarded after their works. They reaped that which they had sown. They
found the nation such as they had made it. That the people had become
possessed of irresistible power before they had attained the slightest
knowledge of the art of government--that practical questions of vast
moment were left to be solved by men to whom politics had been only
matter of theory--that a legislature was composed of persons who were
scarcely fit to compose a debating society--that the whole nation was
ready to lend an ear to any flatterer who appealed to its cupidity, to
its fears, or to its thirst for vengeance--all this was the effect of
misrule, obstinately continued in defiance of solemn warnings, and of
the visible signs of an approaching retribution.

Even while the monarchy seemed to be in its highest and most palmy
state, the causes of that great destruction had already begun to
operate. They may be distinctly traced even under the reign of Louis the
Fourteenth. That reign is the time to which the Ultra-Royalists refer
as the Golden Age of France. It was in truth one of those periods which
shine with an unnatural and delusive splendour, and which are rapidly
followed by gloom and decay.

Concerning Louis the Fourteenth himself, the world seems at last to
have formed a correct judgment. He was not a great general; he was not
a great statesman; but he was, in one sense of the words, a great king.
Never was there so consummate a master of what our James the First would
have called kingcraft,--of all those arts which most advantageously
display the merits of a prince, and most completely hide his defects.
Though his internal administration was bad,--though the military
t