us instructors of Louis XV. had not taught him anything about
mind and soul processes. They were quite unaware that there had
commenced a movement in the _brain_ of France, which was going to
liberate terrific forces--forces which would sweep before them the work
of the Richelieus and the Mazarins and the Colberts as if it were chaff.

The human mind was probing, questioning doubting, everything it had
once believed. And as one after another cherished beliefs disappeared,
it grew still more daring. The whole religious, social, and political
system was wrong. The only remedy was to overthrow it all, and crown
reason as the sovereign of a new era. Such was the ferment at work
beneath the surface as Louis was devising incredible extravagances for
du Barry. And there was rage in men's hearts as they wrote insulting
lines upon his equestrian statue in the Place Louis Quinze.

The Place Louis Quinze was soon to be the Place de la Revolution. The
bronze statue was to be melted into bullets by a maddened populace, and
standing on that very spot was to be the guillotine which would destroy
king, queen, the king's sister, and a great part of the nobility of
France.

It is said that the three great events of modern times are the
Reformation, the American War of Independence, and the French
Revolution. Events such as these have a lurid background, a long vista
of causes behind them! A French Revolution is not the work of a day,
nor of a single man. There had been a steady movement toward this
event for a thousand years--in fact, ever since the dogma that _labor
is degrading_ was placed at the foundation of the social structure of
France.

The direct causes which were precipitating the crisis in the closing
eighteenth century were financial and economic, while the contributing
causes were a remarkable intellectual movement and the War of
Independence in America. It is possible that a king with a heart and a
brain, and the moral sense which belongs to ordinary humanity, might
have averted this tragic outburst, and at least have delayed the event
by awakening hope. The Revolution was born of hopeless misery. With
the reign of Louis XV. hope died, and his successor fell heir to the
inevitable.

A heartless sybarite, depraved in tastes, without sense of
responsibility or comprehension of his times, a brutalized voluptuary
governed by a succession of designing women, regardless of national
poverty, indulging in wildest