ich was very onerous at a time when
each regiment carried heavy baggage after it. Many carts and oxen had to
be collected for the purpose.

_IV.--Reform and Destruction Inevitable_

One further factor, and that the most important, remains to be noted:
the universal discredit into which every form of religious belief had
fallen, at the end of the eighteenth century, and which exercised
without any doubt the greatest influence upon the whole of the French
Revolution; it stamped its character.

Irreligion had produced an enormous public evil. The religious laws
having been abolished at the same time that the civil laws were
overthrown, the minds of men were entirely upset; they no longer knew
either to what to cling or where to stop. And thus arose a hitherto
unknown species of revolutionists, who carried their boldness to a pitch
of madness, who were surprised by no novelty and arrested by no scruple,
and who never hesitated to put any design whatever into execution. Nor
must it be supposed that these new beings have been the isolated and
ephemeral creation of a moment, and destined to pass away as that moment
passed. They have since formed a race of beings which has perpetuated
itself, and spread into all the civilised parts of the world, everywhere
preserving the same physiognomy, the same character.

From the moment when the forces I have described, and the added loss of
religion, matured, I believe that this radical revolution, which was to
confound in common ruin all that was worst and all that was best in the
institutions and condition of France, became inevitable. A people so
ill-prepared to act for themselves could not undertake a universal and
simultaneous reform without a universal destruction.

One last element must be remembered before we conclude. As the common
people of France had not appeared for one single moment on the theatre
of public affairs for upwards of 140 years, no one any longer imagined
that they could ever again resume their position. They appeared
unconscious, and were therefore believed to be deaf. Accordingly, those
who began to take an interest in their condition talked about them in
their presence just as if they had not been there. It seemed as if these
remarks could only be heard by those who were placed above the common
people, and that the only danger to be apprehended was that they might
not be fully understood by the upper classes.

The very men who had most to fear from th