has happened, but--has done no mischief; a fourth--living
in some specially favoured Utopia--declares that in spite of all his
efforts he has found nothing worth recording, but that he himself will
subscribe to so useful a journal, and will exhort all respectable persons
to follow his example: in spite of which loyal endeavours, the journal
seems to have proved a failure, to the great disgust of the king and his
minister, who had of course expected to secure fine weather by nailing,
like the schoolboy before a holiday, the hand of the weather-glass.

Well had it been, if the intermeddling of this bureaucracy had stopped
there. But, by a process of evocation (as it was called), more and more
causes, criminal as well as civil, were withdrawn from the regular
tribunals, to those of the intendants and the Council. Before the
intendant all the lower order of people were generally sent for trial.
Bread-riots were a common cause of such trials, and M. de Tocqueville
asserts that he has found sentences, delivered by the intendant, and a
local council chosen by himself, by which men were condemned to the
galleys, and even to death. Under such a system, under which an
intendant must have felt it his interest to pretend at all risks, that
all was going right, and to regard any disturbance as a dangerous
exposure of himself and his chiefs--one can understand easily enough that
scene which Mr. Carlyle has dramatised from Lacretelle, concerning the
canaille, the masses, as we used to call them a generation since:

"A dumb generation--their voice only an inarticulate cry. Spokesman, in
the king's council, in the world's forum, they have none that finds
credence. At rare intervals (as now, in 1775) they will fling down their
hoes, and hammers; and, to the astonishment of mankind, flock hither and
thither, dangerous, aimless, get the length even of Versailles. Turgot
is altering the corn trade, abrogating the absurdest corn laws; there is
dearth, real, or were it even factitious, an indubitable scarcity of
broad. And so, on the 2nd day of May, 1775, these waste multitudes do
here, at Versailles chateau, in widespread wretchedness, in sallow faces,
squalor, winged raggedness, present as in legible hieroglyphic writing
their petition of grievances. The chateau-gates must be shut; but the
king will appear on the balcony and speak to them. They have seen the
king's face; their petition of grievances has been, if not read, looked
a