transform the social order of all Europe.

Discussion is not only a safety-valve, it is absolutely essential in
governments where the religion, morals, opinions, and occupations of
the people give form and character to institutions and legislation.
The centralized and despotic Bourbon monarchy of France was an
anachronism among an intelligent people. So was every institution
emanating from and dependent upon it. It was impossible for the
structure to stand indefinitely, however tenderly it was treated,
however cleverly it was propped and repaired. As in the case of
England in 1688 and of her colonies in 1772, the immediate and direct
agency in the crash was a matter of money. But the analogy holds good
no further, for in France the questions of property and taxation were
vastly more complex than in England, where the march of events had so
largely destroyed feudalism, or in America, where feudalism had never
existed. On the great French estates the laborers had first to support
the proprietor and his representatives, then the Church and the King;
the minute remainder of their gains was scarcely sufficient to keep
the wolf from the door. The small proprietors were so hampered in
their operations by the tiny size of their holdings that they were
still restricted to ancient and wretched methods of cultivation; but
they too were so burdened with contributions direct and indirect that
famine was always imminent with them as well. Under whatever name the
tax was known, license (octroi), bridge and ferry toll, road-work,
salt-tax, or whatever it may have been, it was chiefly distasteful not
because of its form but because it was oppressive. Some of it was
paid to the proprietors, some to the state. The former was more
hateful because the gainer was near and more tangible; the hatred of
the country people for the feudal privileges and those who held them
was therefore concrete and quite as intense as the more doctrinaire
dislike of the poor in the towns to the rich. Such was the alienation
of classes from each other throughout the beginning and middle of the
century that the disasters which French arms suffered at the hands of
Marlborough and Frederick, so far from humiliating the nation, gave
pleasure and not pain to the masses because they were, as they
thought, defeats not of France, but of the nobility and of the crown.

Feudal dues had arisen when those imposing them had the physical force
to compel their payment and wer