ft behind, to do the
governing of the world. Let them live, and keep what they had. If signs
of vigour still appeared in France, in the wars of Louis XIV. they were
feverish, factitious, temporary--soon, as the event proved, to droop into
the general exhaustion. If wars were still to be waged they were to be
wars of succession, wars of diplomacy; not wars of principle, waged for
the mightiest invisible interests of man. The exhaustion was general;
and to it we must attribute alike the changes and the conservatism of the
Ancien Regime. To it is owing that growth of a centralising despotism,
and of arbitrary regal power, which M. de Tocqueville has set forth in a
book which I shall have occasion often to quote. To it is owing, too,
that longing, which seems to us childish, after ancient forms,
etiquettes, dignities, court costumes, formalities diplomatic, legal,
ecclesiastical. Men clung to them as to keepsakes of the past--revered
relics of more intelligible and better-ordered times. If the spirit had
been beaten out of them in a century of battle, that was all the more
reason for keeping up the letter. They had had a meaning once, a life
once; perhaps there was a little life left in them still; perhaps the dry
bones would clothe themselves with flesh once more, and stand upon their
feet. At least it was useful that the common people should so believe.
There was good hope that the simple masses, seeing the old dignities and
formalities still parading the streets, should suppose that they still
contained men, and were not mere wooden figures, dressed artistically in
official costume. And, on the whole, that hope was not deceived. More
than a century of bitter experience was needed ere the masses discovered
that their ancient rulers were like the suits of armour in the Tower of
London--empty iron astride of wooden steeds, and armed with lances which
every ploughboy could wrest out of their hands, and use in his own
behalf.

The mistake of the masses was pardonable. For those suits of armour had
once held living men; strong, brave, wise; men of an admirable temper;
doing their work according to their light, not altogether well--what man
does that on earth?--but well enough to make themselves necessary to, and
loyally followed by, the masses whom they ruled. No one can read fairly
the "Gesta Dei per Francos in Oriente," or the deeds of the French
Nobility in their wars with England, or those tales--however legen