tablished itself after a short struggle as the dominant element in
English government. But in all the other great states of Europe the wars
of religion had left only the name of freedom. Government tended to a
pure despotism. Privilege was supreme in religion, in politics, in
society. Society itself rested on a rigid division of classes from one
another, which refused to the people at large any equal rights of
justice or of industry.

[Sidenote: France.]

We have already seen how alien such a conception of national life was
from the ideas which the wide diffusion of intelligence during the
eighteenth century was spreading throughout Europe; and in almost every
country some enlightened rulers were striving by administrative reforms
to satisfy in some sort the sense of wrong which was felt around them.
The attempts of sovereigns like Frederick the Great in Prussia and
Joseph the Second in Austria and the Netherlands were rivalled by the
efforts of statesmen such as Turgot in France. It was in France indeed
that the contrast between the actual state of society and the new ideas
of public right was felt most keenly. Nowhere had the victory of the
Crown been more complete. The aristocracy had been robbed of all share
in public affairs; it enjoyed social privileges and exemption from any
contribution to the public burdens without that sense of public duty
which a governing class to some degree always possesses. Guilds and
monopolies fettered the industry of the trader and the merchant, and cut
them off from the working classes, as the value attached to noble blood
cut off both from the aristocracy. If its political position indeed
were compared with that of most of the countries round it, France stood
high. Its government was less oppressive, its general wealth was larger
and more evenly diffused, there was a better administration of justice,
and greater security for public order. Poor as its peasantry seemed to
English eyes, they were far above the peasants of Germany or Spain. Its
middle class was the quickest and most intelligent in Europe. Under
Lewis the Fifteenth opinion was practically free, and a literary class
had sprung up which devoted itself with wonderful brilliancy and
activity to popularizing the ideas of social and political justice which
it learned from English writers, and in the case of Montesquieu and
Voltaire from personal contact with English life. The moral conceptions
of the time, its love of mankind,