y and of Mareilly,
of Esternay and of Roncy, of Mauny and Trucy, come and go through the
archives of the towns and communes here, now defying the kings of France
and trampling on the peasants, now standing by the peasants and still
defying the kings; quarrelling with and plundering the Church to-day,
doing penance to-morrow, and endowing chapels and convents. You
continually come amid the smiling farms and fertile acres upon some
shattered hold whose towers once rose above the hamlet and the church.

A region such as this in England would be rich, not in historic ruins
and historic recollections alone, but in ancient strongholds of feudal
power converted gradually, through the gradual progress of a strong and
steadfast race, into stately modern homes. It would have its Warwick
Castle and its Charlecote, its Guy's Cliff and its Stoneleigh, as well
as its Kenilworth.

But in the great houses and the chateaux, of which there is no lack in
the Laonnais and the Soissonnais, there is little now that is historic,
save their names and their sites. They are standing witnesses to the
essentially criminal and senseless character of the Revolution of 1789.
The _Jacqueries_ which Arthur Young found raging all over France during
that year of ill omen were not much less brutal and they were much more
inexcusable than the _Jacqueries_ of 1357 for which the Comte de Foix
and the Captal de Buch exacted the stern vengeance chronicled by
Froissart. They were the cause and not the consequence of that
emigration of the landed classes which contributed so much to the
downfall of law and order in France.

They were one of the justifying causes, not one of the excusable
consequences, of the armed coalitions of the Continent against
Revolutionary France. Petion and the other scoundrels in Paris who
stirred them up were doubtless 'political' criminals, to adopt a
distinction without a difference much in favour in our times. But the
peasants who took an active part in these crimes were simply brigands
and assassins. They murdered men, they tortured women and children, they
pillaged houses, while the King of France and Navarre was assembling the
States-General to reform the abuses of the government. France was at
peace with all the world. It was the fashion at Versailles and in the
drawing-rooms of Paris to fall into spasms of sentimental emotion over
periwinkles and over peasants--to rave about the instinctive nobility of
human nature and the i