if that could have been effected at once, by an
overwhelming pressure of public feeling, his practical spirit would
not have hungered for further changes.

The _Third_ Estate was _Invoked_ for a _great fiscal_ operation. If it
brought the upper class to the necessary sense of their own
obligations and the national claims, that was enough for the keeper of
the purse, and he would have deprecated the intrusion of other
formidable and absorbing objects, detrimental to his own. Beyond that
was danger, but the course was clear towards obtaining from the
greater assembly what he would have extracted from the less if he had
held office in 1787. That is the secret of Necker's unforeseen
weakness in the midst of so much power, and of his sterility when the
crisis broke and it was discovered that the force which had been
calculated equal to the carrying of a modest and obvious reform was as
the rush of Niagara, and that France was in the resistless rapids.

Everything depended on the manner in which the government decided that
the States should be composed, elected, and conducted. To pronounce on
this, Necker caused the Notables to be convoked again, exposed the
problem, and desired their opinion. The nobles had been lately active
on the side of liberal reforms, and it seemed possible that their
reply might relieve him of a dreaded responsibility and prevent a
conflict. The Notables gave their advice. They resolved that the
Commons should be elected, virtually, by universal suffrage without
conditions of eligibility; that the parish priests should be electors
and eligible; that the lesser class of nobles should be represented
like the greater. They extended the franchise to the unlettered
multitude, because the danger which they apprehended came from the
middle class, not from the lower. But they voted, by three to one,
that each order should be equal in numbers. The Count of Provence, the
king's next brother, went with the minority, and voted that the
deputies of the Commons should be as numerous as those of the two
other orders together. This became the burning question. If the
Commons did not predominate, there was no security that the other
orders would give way. On the other hand, by the important innovation
of admitting the parish clergy, and those whom we should call
provincial gentry, a great concession was made to the popular element.
The antagonism between the two branches of the clergy, and between the
two branches