ed estates; leaving the
noblesse to decay in isolated uselessness and weakness, and in many cases
debt and poverty.

The system--or rather anarchy--according to which France was governed
during this transitional period, may be read in that work of M. de
Tocqueville's which I have already quoted, and which is accessible to all
classes, through Mr. H. Reeve's excellent translation. Every student of
history is, of course, well acquainted with that book. But as there is
reason to fear, from language which is becoming once more too common,
both in speech and writing, that the general public either do not know
it, or have not understood it, I shall take the liberty of quoting from
it somewhat largely. I am justified in so doing by the fact that M. de
Tocqueville's book is founded on researches into the French Archives,
which have been made (as far as I am aware) only by him; and contains
innumerable significant facts, which are to be found (as far as I am
aware) in no other accessible work.

The French people--says M. de Tocqueville--made, in 1789, the greatest
effort which was ever made by any nation to cut, so to speak, their
destiny in halves, and to separate by an abyss that which they had
heretofore been, from that which they sought to become hereafter. But he
had long thought that they had succeeded in this singular attempt much
less than was supposed abroad; and less than they had at first supposed
themselves. He was convinced that they had unconsciously retained, from
the former state of society, most of the sentiments, the habits, and even
the opinions, by means of which they had effected the destruction of that
state of things; and that, without intending it, they had used its
remains to rebuild the edifice of modern society. This is his thesis,
and this he proves, it seems to me, incontestably by documentary
evidence. Not only does he find habits which we suppose--or supposed
till lately--to have died with the eighteenth century, still living and
working, at least in France, in the nineteenth, but the new opinions
which we look on usually as the special children of the nineteenth
century, he shows to have been born in the eighteenth. France, he
considers, is still at heart what the Ancien Regime made her.

He shows that the hatred of the ruling caste, the intense determination
to gain and keep equality, even at the expense of liberty, had been long
growing up, under those influences of which I spoke in my