4. What the Government Has Attempted, and What the Privileged Propose, in Favour of the Third Estate

The government, driven not by motives for which one could be grateful to it but by its own mistakes, and convinced that it could not remedy them without the voluntary concurrence of the nation, thought it could secure on the nation’s part a blind consent to all its projects by offering to do something for it. With this in view, M. de Calonne proposed the plan of the provincial assemblies.

It was impossible to occupy oneself for a moment with the interest of the nation without being struck by the political nullity of the Third Estate. The minister even felt that the distinction of orders was contrary to every hope of good, and he doubtless planned to make it disappear in time. It is at least in this spirit that the first plan of the provincial assemblies seems to have been conceived and drafted. One has only to read it with a little attention to see that no regard was paid in it to the personal order of citizens. It was concerned only with their property, or the real order. It was as a proprietor, and not as a priest, a noble or a commoner, that one was to be called to these assemblies — interesting by their object, and more important still by the manner in which they were to be formed, since through them a true national representation was being established.

Four kinds of property were distinguished: 1. seigneuries. Those who possess them, noble or commoner, churchman or layman, were to form the first class. Ordinary or simple property, as opposed to seigneuries, was divided into three other classes. A more natural distribution would have made only two, indicated by the nature of the work and the balance of interests: namely, the property of the countryside and that of the towns. In the latter would have been included, with the houses, all the arts, manufactures, trades, etc. But it was doubtless believed that the time had not yet come to merge the ordinary property of the Church into these two divisions. So it had been thought proper to leave the simple, that is to say non-seigneurial, property of the clergy in a separate class. That was the second. The third comprised the property of the countryside, and the fourth the property of the towns.

Note that, since three of these kinds of property were held indiscriminately by citizens of all three orders, three classes out of four could have been composed indifferently of nobles, commoners or priests. The second class itself would have contained Knights of Malta, and even laymen, to represent the hospitals, the parish vestries, etc.

It is natural to believe that, with public affairs treated in these assemblies without regard to personal order, a community of interest would soon have formed among the three orders, which would consequently have been the general interest; and the nation would have ended where all nations ought to have begun: by being one.

So many good views escaped the much-vaunted mind of the principal minister. Not that he failed to see very well the interest he wanted to serve; but he understood nothing of the real value of what he was spoiling. He restored the impolitic division by personal orders; and although this single change entailed the need for a new plan, he was content with the old one in everything that did not seem to him to conflict with his intentions; and he was then astonished at the thousand difficulties that arose every day from the want of agreement. The nobility above all could not conceive how it could regenerate itself in assemblies where the genealogists had been forgotten. Its anxieties on this score were amusing for observers.

Among all the defects in the execution of this institution, the greatest was to begin it with the roof, instead of setting it on its natural foundations, the free election of the people. But at least the minister, to pay a sort of homage to the rights of the Third Estate, announced for its order a number of representatives equal to those of the clergy and the nobility combined. The regulation is explicit on this point. What happened? Deputies for the Third Estate were got named from among the privileged. I know one of these assemblies in which, out of fifty-two members, only one is not privileged. That is how the cause of the Third Estate is served, even after it has been publicly announced that justice is to be done to it!

The Notables disappointed the hopes of both the one minister and the other. Nothing is more apt about them than M. C——’s excellent stroke of the brush: “The King twice gathered them around him to consult them on the interests of the throne and of the nation. What did the Notables do in 1787? They defended their privileges against the throne. What did the Notables do in 1788? They defended their privileges against the nation.” The fact is that instead of consulting notables in privilege, one ought to have consulted notables in enlightenment. The humblest private persons make no mistake about this when they have to seek advice on their own affairs, or on those of people in whom they are truly interested.

M. Necker was deceived. But could he imagine that these same men who had voted to admit the Third Estate in equal numbers to the provincial assemblies would reject this equality for the Estates-General? However that may be, the public was not deceived. It was always heard disapproving of a measure whose outcome it foresaw, and to which, on the best supposition, it attributed delays harmful to the nation. This might seem the place to set out some of the motives that inspired the majority of the last Notables. But let us not anticipate the judgement of history; it will speak only too soon about men who, placed in the finest of circumstances and able to dictate to a great nation what is just, fine and good, preferred to prostitute this superb occasion to a wretched corporate interest, and to give posterity one more example of the empire of prejudice over the public mind.

The ministry’s attempts, as can be seen, have borne no happy fruit for the Third Estate.

It is a remarkable thing that the cause of the Third Estate has been defended more eagerly and more forcefully by ecclesiastical and noble writers than by the non-privileged themselves.

In the slowness of the Third Estate I have seen only the habit of silence and fear in the oppressed, which offers one more proof of the reality of the oppression. Is it possible to reflect seriously on the principles and the end of the social state without being revolted to the depths of one’s soul by the monstrous partiality of human institutions? I am not astonished that the first two orders have furnished the first defenders of justice and humanity; for if talents depend on the exclusive use of the intelligence and on long habit, and if the members of the order of the Third Estate must for a thousand reasons distinguish themselves in that career, the lights of public morality must show themselves more in men much better placed to grasp the great social relations, and in whom the original spring is less commonly broken; it must be admitted that there are sciences that belong as much to the soul as to the mind. The nation will not attain liberty without recalling with gratitude those patriotic authors of the first two orders who, first abjuring old errors, preferred the principles of universal justice to the murderous combinations of corporate interest against the national interest. Until the public honours that will be decreed to them, may they not disdain the homage of a citizen whose soul burns for a fatherland, and who adores every effort that tends to raise it from the rubble of feudalism!

Certainly the first two orders have an interest in restoring the Third Estate to its rights. We must not hide it from ourselves: the guarantee of public liberty can only be where real strength is. We can be free only with the people and through it.

If a consideration of this importance is beyond the frivolity and narrow egoism of most French heads, they will at least be unable to help being struck by the changes that have come about in public opinion. The empire of reason extends further every day; it makes the restitution of usurped rights more and more necessary. Sooner or later all classes will have to confine themselves within the bounds of the social contract, a contract that concerns and binds all the associates, one towards another. Will it be in order to gather its innumerable advantages, or to sacrifice them to despotism? That is the real question. In the long night of feudal barbarism, the true relations of men may have been destroyed, all notions overturned, all justice corrupted; but at the dawning of the light, Gothic absurdities must flee, and the remnants of ancient ferocity fall and vanish. That is certain. Shall we merely exchange one set of evils for another, or will the social order, in all its beauty, take the place of the old disorder? Will the changes we are about to undergo be the bitter fruit of a civil war, disastrous in every respect for the three orders and profitable only to ministerial power; or will they be the natural, foreseen and well-governed effect of a simple and just view, of a happy concurrence, favoured by powerful circumstances and promoted frankly by all the classes concerned?

The Notables expressed the formal wish that the three orders should bear the same taxes. It was not on this matter that their opinion had been asked. The question was the manner of convoking the Estates-General, not the decisions that assembly will have to take. So this wish can be regarded only like those that have come from the peers, from the Parlement, and finally from so many private societies and individuals who are hastening today to agree that the richest should pay as much as the poorest.

We cannot hide it: so novel a concurrence has frightened part of the public. No doubt, it has been said, it is good and praiseworthy to show oneself disposed in advance to submit willingly to a fair apportionment of taxation once it has been pronounced by the law. But whence comes, on the part of the second order, so new a zeal, so much agreement and so much eagerness? In offering a voluntary cession, does it hope to spare the law from making it an act of justice? Might not too much attention to forestalling what the Estates-General are to do tend towards doing without them? I do not accuse the nobility of saying to the King: “Sire, you need the Estates-General only to restore your finances: very well! we offer to pay like the Third Estate; see whether this surplus might not deliver you from an assembly that worries us more than you.” No, that view is impossible to suppose.

One might rather suspect the nobility of wanting to delude the Third Estate, of wanting, at the price of a sort of anticipation of equity, to put it off the scent of its present petitions and distract it from the necessity, for it, of being something in the Estates-General. It seems to say to the Third Estate: “What are you asking? That we should pay as you do? That is just; we shall pay. So leave the old course of things alone, in which you were nothing, in which we were everything, and in which it was so easy for us to pay only what we chose.” How useful it would be to the privileged classes to purchase, at the price of a forced renunciation, the maintenance of all the abuses and the hope of increasing them still further! If all that is needed to conclude this excellent bargain is to stir up a little enthusiasm in the people, does anyone think it so very difficult to move it, even to melt it, by speaking of relieving it and by making the words equality, honour, fraternity, etc., etc., etc., ring in its ears?

The Third Estate may reply: “It is certainly time that you bore with us the weight of a tribute that is much more useful to you than to us. You foresaw very well that this monstrous iniquity could not last any longer. If we are free in our grants, it is clear that we neither can, nor should, nor will make them more abundant than yours. This one resolution on our part makes us more or less indifferent to those acts of renunciation which you never cease to vaunt as the rarest thing that generosity and honour can command of French knights. Yes, you will pay, not out of generosity but out of justice; not because you are willing, but because you owe it. We expect from you an act of obedience to the common law rather than the token of an insulting pity for an order which you have so long treated without pity. But it is in the Estates-General that this matter must be discussed; today the question is to constitute them properly. If the Third Estate is not represented there, the nation will be dumb there. Nothing will be able to be done there validly. Even if you found a way of establishing good order everywhere without our concurrence, we cannot allow ourselves to be disposed of without us. Long and grievous experience even prevents us from believing in the solidity of any good law that would be only the gift of the strongest.”

The privileged never tire of saying that all is equal between the orders from the moment they renounce their pecuniary exemptions. If all is equal, what do they fear from the demands of the Third Estate? Do they imagine it would want to injure itself by attacking a common interest? If all is equal, why all these efforts to prevent it from emerging from its political nullity?

But I ask where is the miraculous power that will guarantee France against any abuse of any kind, merely because the nobility will pay its share of the tax. If abuses or disorders still subsist, let someone explain to me how all can be equal between the man who enjoys them and the man who suffers from them.

All is equal! Was it, then, in a spirit of equality that the Third Estate was excluded, in the most dishonouring manner, from all the posts and all the places of any distinction? Was it in a spirit of equality that an extra tribute was wrung from it to create that prodigious quantity of resources of every kind intended exclusively for what is called the poor nobility?

In every affair that arises between a privileged man and a man of the people, is not the latter sure of being oppressed with impunity, precisely because, if he dares to ask for justice, he must have recourse to privileged men? They alone dispose of all the powers; and is not their first impulse to regard the commoner’s complaint as a want of subordination?

Why do the minions of the police and of justice perform their functions only with trembling towards the privileged man, even towards one caught in the act, while they treat with such brutality the poor man who is as yet only accused?

For whom are all those privileges in judicial matters — the attributions, the evocations, the letters of respite, etc. — with which one discourages or ruins one’s opponent? Is it for the non-privileged Third Estate?

Who are the citizens most exposed to the personal vexations of the agents of the fisc and of the underlings in every department of the administration? The members of the Third Estate; I always mean the true Third Estate, the one that enjoys no exemption.

Why do the privileged, after the most horrible crimes, almost always escape punishment, so that public order is robbed of its most effective examples?

With what absurd and ferocious contempt you dare to put back into the common order the privileged criminal, in order, you say, to degrade him, and apparently to make him, in such company, fit to undergo his punishment! What would you say if the legislator, before punishing a villain of the Third Estate, took care to purge his order of him by giving him letters of nobility?

The law dictates different penalties for the privileged man and for the man who is not. It seems to follow the noble criminal tenderly, and to wish to honour him even on the scaffold. To this abominable distinction — which at bottom can seem worth preserving only to those who are planning some crime — is attached, as we know, the penalty of infamy for the whole family of the unhappy man who has been executed without privilege; the law is guilty of this atrocity, and people would refuse to reform it! The obligation is the same for all, the infraction is the same; why should the penalty be different? Bear well in mind that, in the present state of things, you never punish a privileged man without honouring him, and without punishing the nation, which had already suffered enough from his crime.

I ask: is it permissible, casting the most superficial glance over society, to repeat that all will be equal from the moment the nobility renounces its pecuniary exemptions? There are men who are sensitive only to money; utterly paralysed with regard to everything connected with liberty, with honour, with equality before the law — in a word, with all social rights except money — they cannot conceive that anyone should worry about anything other than paying a crown more or less. But it is not for vile men that I write.

What should be said of the exclusive privilege of appearing armed, even in time of peace, outside military duties and without the uniform of that calling? If the privileged man arms himself to defend his life, his property and his honour, has the man of the Third Estate less interest in preserving his life and his property; is he not as sensitive about his honour? Would anyone dare to maintain that the law, watching over him more attentively, dispenses him more than the privileged man from arming himself in his own defence?

If all is equal, why those voluminous collections of laws to the advantage of the nobility? Have you found the secret of favouring one order without its being at the expense of the others? And when you know very well that this special legislation makes of the nobility a kind of species apart, born to command, and of the rest of the citizens a people of helots destined to serve, you dare to lie to your conscience, and to try to stun the nation by crying out to it that all is equal!

Finally, the laws you believe to be the most general and the most free of partiality are themselves accomplices of privilege. Consult their spirit; follow their effects; for whom do they seem to be made? For the privileged. Against whom? Against the people, etc., etc.

And people want the people to be content and to think of nothing more, because the nobility agrees to pay as it does! They want new generations to close their eyes to the enlightenment of their age, and to grow quietly accustomed to an order of oppression which the passing generations could no longer endure! Let us leave an inexhaustible subject which awakens only feelings of indignation.

All the taxes peculiar to the Third Estate will be abolished; there can be no doubt of it. It was a strange country in which the citizens who profited most from the commonwealth contributed least to it! In which there were taxes it was shameful to bear, and which the legislator himself branded as degrading! Consulting sound ideas alone, what a society, in which work makes a man derogate; in which it is honourable to consume and humiliating to produce; in which the toilsome professions are called vile — as if there could be anything vile but vice, and as if it were in the labouring classes that the most of this vileness, the only real kind, was to be found!

Finally, all those words taille, franc-fief, ustensile, etc., will be banished for ever from the language of politics, and the legislator will no longer take a stupid pleasure in repelling the foreigners whom these degrading distinctions prevented from bringing their capital and their industry among us.

But while foreseeing this advantage, and a thousand others that a well-constituted assembly must procure for the people, I still see nothing that promises the Third Estate a good constitution. It is no further forward with its demands. The privileged persist in defending all their advantages. Whatever the proportional number of their deputies, they want to form two separate chambers; they want two votes out of three, and they maintain that each of them has the negative. An excellent means of making all reform impossible! This immobility might suit the first two orders. But can the Third Estate be content with it? It is clear that it is not for the Third Estate to repeat the pretty saying of the farmer-general: “Why change? We are so well off!”

The ministry fears above all a form of deliberation which, by halting all business, would also hold up the grant of the supplies it expects. If at least agreement could be reached to fill the deficit, the rest would hardly interest it; the orders might dispute as much and as long as they liked. On the contrary, the less progress they made, the more the ministry would hope to strengthen itself in its arbitrary authority. Hence a means of conciliation that is beginning to be hawked about everywhere, and which would be as useful to the privileged and to the ministry as it would be fatal to the Third Estate. It is proposed to vote by heads on the subsidies and everything concerning taxation. After that, the orders would be quite welcome to withdraw into their chambers as into impregnable fortresses, where the Commons would deliberate without success and the privileged enjoy without fear, while the minister remained master. But can it be believed that the Third Estate will fall into so crude a trap? Since the voting of subsidies must be the last operation of the Estates-General, agreement must first have been reached on a general form for all deliberations; and no doubt it will not have departed from the one that preserves to the assembly the use of all its enlightenment and all its wisdom.

Different interests have had time to arise within the order of the nobility. It is not far from dividing into two parties. Everything connected with the three or four hundred most distinguished families longs for the establishment of an upper chamber like that of England; their pride feeds on the hope of no longer being lost in the crowd of gentlemen. So the high nobility would heartily consent to throw the rest of the nobles, together with the generality of citizens, into the Chamber of Commons. The Third Estate will carefully guard against a system that tends to nothing less than filling its chamber with people whose interest is so contrary to the common interest; a system that would soon put it back into nullity and oppression. There is in this respect a real difference between England and France. In England the only privileged nobles are those to whom the constitution grants a part of the legislative power. All other citizens are united in the same interest; there are no privileges to make them into distinct orders. If, then, one wants to unite the three orders into one in France, one must first abolish every kind of privilege. The noble and the priest must have no interest other than the common interest, and must enjoy, by force of law, only the rights of a simple citizen. Without that, it is useless to unite the three orders under the same name; they will always be three heterogeneous substances that cannot be amalgamated. No one will accuse me of upholding the distinction of orders, which I regard as the invention most harmful to all social good. The only misfortune I know greater than this one is the extreme misfortune of merging these orders in name while leaving them really separate through the maintenance of privileges. That would consecrate for ever their triumph over the nation. Public safety requires that the common interest of society should be maintained somewhere, pure and unmixed. And it is with this in view, the only good one, the only national one, that the Third Estate will never lend itself to the entry of several orders into a so-called Chamber of Commons; for a Commons composed of different orders is a monstrous idea. It may be said that there is a contradiction in the terms.

It will be supported in its resistance by the lesser nobility, which will never be willing to exchange the privileges it enjoys for a lustre that would not be its own. See indeed how it rises in Languedoc against the aristocracy of the barons. Men in general very much like to bring down to equality everything that is above them; they then show themselves philosophers. The word becomes odious to them only at the moment they perceive the same principles in their inferiors.

The plan for two chambers is nevertheless gaining among us so many partisans that there is truly cause for alarm. The differences we have just pointed out are real; a nation cut up into orders will never have anything in common with a nation that is one. How do you expect to build in France, with such dissimilar materials, the same political edifice as in England?

Do you intend to admit into your lower chamber a part of your first two orders? Then tell us first how a Commons can be composed of several orders. We have just proved that a Commons can only be a body of citizens having the same civil and political rights. It is mockery to understand it otherwise, and to believe one is forming a Commons by seating in the same hall citizens who have unequal civil and political privileges. It is not in England that you will find so strange a combination. I add that it would not take long for that part of the nobility you introduced into your so-called Chamber of Commons to seize most of the deputations. The Third Estate would lose its true representatives, and we should return to the old course of things, in which the nobility was everything and the nation nothing.

To avoid these drawbacks, would you propose to set aside the second chamber exclusively for the Third Estate? Then you change nothing in your present position. It is even one more evil to unite the two privileged orders; by this alliance you make them stronger against the common order, and all of them together will be weaker against the ministerial power, which sees very well that between two divided peoples it will always be the one to lay down the law. Besides, in this new arrangement I do not see that you come any closer to the English constitution. You legitimise and consecrate the distinction of the privileged order; you separate its interests for ever from those of the nation, and you perpetuate the hatred, or rather the sort of civil war, that agitates every people divided into privileged and non-privileged. Among our neighbours, on the contrary, all the interests of the nation are united in the House of Commons. The peers themselves would take good care not to be opposed to the common interest; it is their own, and above all that of their brothers, their children and their whole family, who belong by right to the Commons. And people dare to compare the House of Lords in England with a chamber that would unite the clergy and the nobility in France! In whatever form you present it, you will not escape a host of evils that belong to it essentially. If you compose it of true representatives of the clergy and the nobility of the whole kingdom, that will be, as we say, to separate the two interests for ever, and to give up the hope of forming a nation. If you make it a chamber of peers, you may either fill it with deputies elected by a certain number of the most distinguished families, or, quite simply, so as to depart still less from your English model, you may make the quality of peer a hereditary privilege, or at least a life one. All these suppositions only multiply the difficulties; all of them make necessary a Chamber of Commons of mixed composition, and consequently a monstrous one, etc. Moreover, when it pleases the King of England to create a peer, he is not obliged to take him from one class of citizens only; another difference, which utterly confounds our ideas of nobility.

I have one last remark to make; it follows naturally from the supposition of an upper chamber composed of hereditary members, or of members chosen for life. It is certain that such personages would in no way be representatives of the nation, and yet they would exercise its powers. In good faith, would it be impossible to foresee circumstances in which the convocation of the Commons would become very awkward? A thousand reasons, easy to grasp, might first postpone it from one date to another. At last time would press so hard that the upper chamber would be duly invited to give its consent in advance to such and such a loan, such and such a law, etc.; I leave it to the reader’s imagination to travel the rest of the road. It would be rather amusing if we ended up with that very cour plénière which we gave such a bad reception not long ago! It must be permitted, it seems to me, not to like a plan that might lead us to the precipice we thought we had avoided for ever. We certainly need neither a royal chamber nor a feudal chamber. But I shall remark, before ending this article, that I have attacked the distinction of chambers only in so far as it would be a distinction of orders. Separate these two ideas, and I shall be the first to ask for three chambers, equal in everything, each composed of a third of the great national deputation. It would only remain, in this new plan, to adopt the means indicated on pages 89 and 90 of the Views on the Means of Execution, etc., to obtain always a common resolution by the majority of heads in every case where the three chambers, considered as bodies, did not agree.

We should not have so much faith in English institutions if political knowledge were older or more widespread among us. In this respect the French nation is composed of men either too young or too old. These two ages, which are alike in so many ways, resemble each other also in that both can be guided only by example. The young seek to imitate; the old know only how to repeat. The latter are faithful to their own habits; the former ape the habits of others. That is the limit of their industry.

Let no one be surprised, then, to see a nation, barely opening its eyes to the light, turn to the constitution of England and want to take it as its model in everything. It would be much to be wished, at this moment, that some good writer would undertake to enlighten us on the two following questions: Is the British constitution good in itself? Even if it were good, could it suit France?

I am very much afraid that this so-vaunted masterpiece could not withstand an impartial examination made according to the principles of true political order. We should perhaps recognise that it is the product of chance and circumstance much more than of enlightenment. Its upper chamber evidently bears the marks of the period of the revolution. We have already noted that it could hardly be regarded as anything but a monument of Gothic superstition.

Look at the national representation: how bad it is in all its elements, by the admission of the English themselves! And yet the characteristics of a good representation are what is most essential to form a good legislature.

Was it from true principles that the idea was drawn of dividing the legislative power into three parts, of which only one is supposed to speak in the name of the nation? If the lords and the king are not representatives of the nation, they are nothing in the legislative power; for the nation alone can will for itself, and consequently make laws for itself. Whatever enters the legislative body is competent to vote for the people only in so far as it is charged with their mandate. But where is the mandate when there is no free and general election?

I do not deny that the English constitution is an astonishing work for the time when it was settled. Yet, although people are quite ready to mock a Frenchman who does not prostrate himself before it, I shall dare to say that instead of the simplicity of good order I see in it rather a scaffolding of precautions against disorder. And since everything is linked in political institutions, since there is no effect that is not in its turn the origin of a series of effects and causes which one follows further the more attention one is capable of, it is not extraordinary that strong minds should perceive great profundity in it. Besides, it is in the ordinary course of things that the most complicated machines should precede the true progress of the social art, as of all the other arts; its triumph, likewise, will be to produce the greatest effects by simple means.

It would be wrong to decide in favour of the British constitution precisely because it has held together for a hundred years and seems likely to go on for centuries more. Among human institutions, which is there that does not last a very long time, however bad it may be? Does not despotism go on too; does it not seem eternal in the greater part of the world?

A better proof is to appeal to effects. Comparing in this light the English people with their neighbours on the Continent, it is hard not to believe that they possess something better. And indeed they have a constitution, incomplete as it may be, and we have nothing. The difference is great. It is not surprising that it shows in the effects. But it is surely an error to attribute to the power of the constitution alone all that is good in England. There is evidently a certain law that is worth more than the constitution itself. I mean trial by jury, the true guarantee of individual liberty in every country of the world where men aspire to be free. This method of administering justice is the only one that gives protection against the abuses of judicial power, so frequent and so dreadful wherever one is not judged by one’s peers. With it, all that remains in order to be free is to guard against illegal orders that might issue from the ministerial power; and for that one needs either a good constitution, which England does not have, or circumstances such that the head of the executive power cannot uphold his arbitrary will by open force. It is plain that the English nation is the only one permitted not to have a land army formidable to the nation. It is therefore the only one that can be free without a good constitution. This thought should suffice to cure us of the mania for imitating our neighbours; let us rather consult our own needs; they are closer to us; they will inspire us much better. If you try to naturalise the English constitution among you, there is no doubt that you will easily obtain its defects, since they will be useful to the one power from which you would have any obstacle to fear. Will you obtain its advantages? That question is more problematic, because you will then come up against a power interested in preventing you from fulfilling your wishes. After all, why do we desire this exotic constitution so ardently? Apparently because it comes close to the good principles of the social state. But if there is, for judging progress towards the good in every field, a model of the good and the beautiful, and if it cannot be said that this model, as regards the social art, is less known to us today than it was to the English in 1688, why should we neglect the true type of the good and confine ourselves to imitating a copy? Let us rise at once to the ambition of wishing to serve as an example to the nations ourselves.

No people, it is said, has done better than the English; and even if that were so, should the products of the political art at the end of the eighteenth century be only what they were in the seventeenth? The English were not below the enlightenment of their time; let us not remain below that of ours. Above all, let us not be discouraged at seeing nothing in history that could suit our position. The true science of the social state does not go back far. Men built cottages for a long time before they were able to raise palaces. Who does not see that social architecture must have been slower still in its progress, since this art, though the most important of all, could, as may well be imagined, expect no encouragement from despots and aristocrats?