tiness,
insolence, and heartlessness of the aristocracy, and thus destroyed all
respect for them, ending in bitter animosities. Closely connected with
these two gigantic evils was the excessive taxation, which oppressed the
nation and made it discontented and rebellious. The fourth most
prominent cause of agitation was the writings of infidel philosophers
and economists, whose unsound and sophistical theories held out
fallacious hopes, and undermined those sentiments by which all
governments and institutions are preserved. These will be incidentally
presented, as thereby we shall be able to trace the career of the
remarkable man who controlled the National Assembly, and who applied
the torch to the edifice whose horrid and fearful fires he would
afterwards have suppressed. It is easy to destroy; it is difficult to
reconstruct. Nor is there any human force which can arrest a national
conflagration when once it is kindled: only on its ashes can a new
structure arise, and this only after long and laborious efforts and
humiliating disappointments.

It might have been possible for the Government to contend successfully
with the various elements of discontent among the people, intoxicated
with those abstract theories of rights which Rousseau had so eloquently
defended, if it had possessed a strong head and the sinews of war. But
Louis XVI., a modest, timid, temperate, moral young man of twenty-three,
by the death of his father and elder brothers had succeeded to the
throne of his dissolute grandfather at just the wrong time. He was a
gentleman, but no ruler. He had no personal power, and the powers of his
kingdom had been dissipated by his reckless predecessors. Not only was
the army demoralized, and inclined to fraternize with the people, but
there was no money to pay the troops or provide for the ordinary
expenses of the Court. There was an alarming annual deficit, and the
finances were utterly disordered. Successive ministers had exhausted all
ordinary resources and the most ingenious forms of taxation. They made
promises, and resorted to every kind of expediency, which had only a
temporary effect. The primal evils remained. The national treasury was
empty. Calonne and Necker pursued each a different policy, and with the
same results. The extravagance of the one and the economy of the other
were alike fatal. Nobody would make sacrifices in a great national
exigency. The nobles and the clergy adhered tenaciously to their
p