Popular Government: Four Essays

THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT.

Thk blindness of the privileged classes in France to the Revolution which was about to overwhelm them furnishes some of the best-worn commonplaces of modern history. There was no doubt much in it to surprise us. What King, Noble, and Priest could not see, had been easily visible to the foreign observer. “In sjhort,” runs the famous passage in Chesterfield’s letter of December 25, 1753, “all the symptoms which I ever met with in history previous to great changes and revohitions in government now exist and daily increase in France.” A large number of writers of our day, manifesting the wisdom which comes after the event, have pointed out that the signs of a terrible time ought not to have been mistaken. The Court, the Aristocracy, and the Clergy should have understood that, in face of the irreligion which was daily becoming more fashionable, the belief in privilege conferred by birth could not be long maintained. They should have noted the portents of imminent political disturbance in the intense jealousy of classes. They should have been prepared for a tremendous social upheaval by the squalor and misery of the peasants. They should have observed the immediate causes of revolution in the disorder of the finances and in the gross inequality of taxation. They should have been wise enough to know that the entire structure, of which the keystone was a stately and scandalous Court, was undermined on all sides. “Beautiful Armida Palace, where the inmates live enchanted lives; lapped in soft music of adulation; waited on by the splendours of the world; which nevertheless hangs wondrously as by a single hair.”