he name of a National Assembly, were elected, not at all
to change the fabric of the French Government, but simply to reform, in
concert with the king, abuses, two-thirds of which were virtually
defunct when the king took off his hat to the Three Orders at Versailles
on the 5th of May, 1789, and the rest of which took a new lease of life,
often under new names, from the follies and the crimes of the First
Republic, after the 22nd of September, 1792. Two contemporary observers,
watching the drama from very different points of view, Arthur Young and
Gouverneur Morris, long ago discerned this. M. Henri Taine, and the
group of conscientious historical students who, during the last quarter
of a century, have been reconstructing the annals of the revolutionary
period, have put it beyond all doubt. The enormous majority of the
French people, and even of the people of Paris, were so little
infatuated with the 'principles of 1789' that they regarded the advent
to power of the first Napoleon with inexpressible relief, as making an
end of what Arthur Young calls, and not too sternly, a series of
constitutions 'formed by conventions of rabble and sanctioned by the
_sans-culottes_ of the kennel.' Without fully understanding this, it is
impossible to understand either the history of the Napoleons, or the
present antagonism between France and the Third Republic.

Of this I am so deeply convinced that I have thought it right to
interweave, when occasion offered, with my account of things as they are
in France, what I believe to be the historic truth as to things as they
were in France at and before the period of the Revolution. To judge the
France of 1890 fairly, and forecast its future intelligently, we must
thoroughly rid ourselves of the notion that the masses of the French
people had anything more to do with the dethronement and the murder of
Louis XVI. than the masses of the English people had to do with the
dethronement and the murder of Charles I. Neither crime was perpetrated
to enlarge the liberties or to protect the interests of the people. We
long ago got at the truth about the great English rebellion. 'Pride's
Purge,' the 'elective kingship without a veto of the 'New Model,' and
the merciless mystification of Bradshaw, tell their own story. Steering
to avoid the Scylla of Strafford, the luckless Parliamentarians ran the
ship of State full into the Charybdis of Cromwell.

It is only within very recent times that the daylight