ld dear, noted with approval many
remarkable {293} signs of activity across the Channel. While the strain
upon the false financial system of France had become so great that the
attempt to stop the hole in the money chest broke the spirit of finance
minister after finance minister, a feeling in favor of some change in the
system that made such catastrophes possible seemed to be on the increase
in educated and even in aristocratic circles. Many Englishmen of that
day knew France, or at least Paris, fairly well. If Pitt had paid the
French capital but a single visit, Fox was intimately acquainted with it,
and Walpole was almost as familiar with a superficial Paris as he was
with a superficial London. Dr. Johnson, not very long before the time of
which we write, had visited Paris with his friends the Thrales, and had
made the acquaintance of a brewer named Santerre. Arthur Young travelled
in France as he travelled in England and in Ireland. On the other hand,
Frenchmen who were soon to be conspicuous advocates of change were not
unknown on the English side of the Channel. Mirabeau was known in
London--not too favorably--and the cousin of the French King, the Duke de
Chartres, afterwards Duke of Orleans, had moved in London society and was
to move there again. So when educated Englishmen heard that Lafayette
had demanded the revival of the States-General, unused and almost
forgotten these two centuries, they knew that the friend of Washington
was not likely to ask for impossibilities. When the Duke of Orleans set
himself openly in opposition to the King, his cousin, they recognized a
significance in the act, and when Mirabeau asserted himself as the
champion of a growing agitation in favor of an oppressed and
unrepresented people they remembered the big, vehement man who had passed
so much of his life in prisons and had played the spy upon the Prussian
Court. Gradually prepared for some change in the administrative system
of France, they were not prepared for the rapid succession of changes
that followed upon the formal convocation of the States-General in the
spring of 1789.

The States-General was the nearest approach to a representative
parliamentary system that was known to France. {294} But the
States-General had not been summoned to aid the deliberations of a French
monarch in the course of many reigns. France had lived under what was
practically a despotism untempered by an expression of organized public
o