ies and by the
clergy. "The pleasure of the nobles was considered the supreme law; the
farmers and the peasants might starve, for aught their oppressors
cared.... The people were compelled at every turn to consult the exclusive
interest of the landlord. The lives of the agricultural laborers were
lives of incessant work and unrelieved misery; their complaints, if they
ever dared to complain, were treated with insolent contempt. The courts of
justice would always listen to a noble as against a peasant; bribes were
notoriously accepted by the judges; and the merest caprice of the
aristocracy had the force of law, by virtue of this system of universal
corruption. Of the taxes wrung from the commonalty, by the secular
magnates on the one hand, and the clergy on the other, not half ever found
its way into the royal or episcopal treasury; the rest was squandered in
profligate self-indulgence. And the men who thus impoverished their
fellow-subjects were themselves exempt from taxation, and entitled by law
or custom to all the appointments of the state. The privileged classes
numbered a hundred and fifty thousand, and for their gratification
millions were condemned to hopeless and degrading lives."(415)

The court was given up to luxury and profligacy. There was little
confidence existing between the people and the rulers. Suspicion fastened
upon all the measures of the government, as designing and selfish. For
more than half a century before the time of the Revolution, the throne was
occupied by Louis XV., who, even in those evil times, was distinguished as
an indolent, frivolous, and sensual monarch. With a depraved and cruel
aristocracy and an impoverished and ignorant lower class, the state
financially embarrassed, and the people exasperated, it needed no
prophet's eye to foresee a terrible impending outbreak. To the warnings of
his counselors the king was accustomed to reply, "Try to make things go on
as long as I am likely to live; after my death it may be as it will." It
was in vain that the necessity of reform was urged. He saw the evils, but
had neither the courage nor the power to meet them. The doom awaiting
France was but too truly pictured in his indolent and selfish
answer,--"After me, the deluge!"

By working upon the jealousy of the kings and the ruling classes, Rome had
influenced them to keep the people in bondage, well knowing that the state
would thus be weakened, and purposing by this means to fasten both r