ly
decimated, even though such a measure would certainly have left the
government in desperation.

At that dreadful moment of the Sixth of October, amid the slaughter of
guards and the frantic yells of hatred against the Queen, it is no
wonder that some were found to urge the King to flee to Metz. If he had
accepted the advice, the course of the Revolution would have been
different; but its march would have been just as irresistible, for
revolution lay in the force of a hundred combined circumstances. Lewis,
however, rejected these counsels, and suffered the mob to carry him in
bewildering procession to his capital and his prison. That great man who
was watching French affairs with such consuming eagerness from distant
Beaconsfield in our English Buckinghamshire, instantly divined that this
procession from Versailles to the Tuileries marked the fall of the
monarchy. 'A revolution in sentiment, manners, and moral opinions, the
most important of all revolutions in a word,' was in Burke's judgment to
be dated from the Sixth of October 1789.

The events of that day did, indeed, give its definite cast to the
situation. The moral authority of the sovereign came to an end, along
with the ancient and reverend mystery of the inviolability of his
person. The Count d'Artois, the King's second brother, one of the most
worthless of human beings, as incurably addicted to sinister and
suicidal counsels in 1789 as he was when he overthrew his own throne
forty years later, had run away from peril and from duty after the
insurrection of July. After the insurrection of October, a troop of the
nobles of the court followed him. The personal cowardice of the
Emigrants was only matched by their political blindness. Many of the
most unwise measures in the Assembly were only passed by small
majorities, and the majorities would have been transformed into
minorities, if in the early days of the Revolution these unworthy men
had only stood firm at their posts. Selfish oligarchies have scarcely
ever been wanting in courage. The emigrant noblesse of France are almost
the only instance of a great privileged and territorial caste that had
as little bravery as they had patriotism. The explanation is that they
had been an oligarchy, not of power or duty, but of self-indulgence.
They were crushed by Richelieu to secure the unity of the monarchy. They
now effaced themselves at the Revolution, and this secured that far
greater object, the unity of the na