re shadow of the past, with the thunder
and the hurricane in their hands, our poor prayers are of no more avail
than the unbodied visions of a dream.

The old popular assembly of the realm was not resorted to before every
means of dispensing with so drastic a remedy had been tried. Historians
sometimes write as if Turgot were the only able and reforming minister
of the century. God forbid that we should put any other minister on a
level with that high and beneficent figure. But Turgot was not the first
statesman, both able and patriotic, who had been disgraced for want of
compliance with the conditions of success at court; he was only the last
of a series. Chauvelin, a man of vigour and capacity, was dismissed
with ignominy in 1736. Machault, a reformer, at once courageous and
wise, shared the same fate twenty years later; and in his case
revolution was as cruel and as heedless as reaction, for, at the age of
ninety-one, the old man was dragged, blind and deaf, before the
revolutionary tribunal and thence despatched to the guillotine. Between
Chauvelin and Machault, the elder D'Argenson, who was greater than
either of them, had been raised to power, and then speedily hurled down
from it (1747), for no better reason than that his manners were uncouth,
and that he would not waste his time in frivolities that were as the
breath of life in the great gallery at Versailles and on the
smooth-shaven lawns of Fontainebleau.

Not only had wise counsellors been tried; consultative assemblies had
been tried also. Necker had been dismissed in 1781, after publishing the
memorable Report which first initiated the nation in the elements of
financial knowledge. The disorder waxed greater, and the monarchy drew
nearer to bankruptcy each year. The only modern parallel to the state of
things in France under Lewis the Sixteenth is to be sought in the state
of things in Egypt or in Turkey. Lewis the Fourteenth had left a debt of
between two and three thousand millions of livres, but this had been
wiped out by the heroic operations of Law; operations, by the way, which
have never yet been scientifically criticised. But the debt soon grew
again, by foolish wars, by the prodigality of the court, and by the
rapacity of the nobles. It amounted in 1789 to something like two
hundred and forty millions sterling; and it is interesting to notice
that this was exactly the sum of the public debt of Great Britain at the
same time. The year's excess of e