ne.

IV

THE MEETING OF THE STATES-GENERAL

The argument of the drama which opened on May 6, 1789, and closed on
June 27, is this:--The French people had been called to the enjoyment
of freedom by every voice they heard--by the king; by the notables,
who proposed unrestricted suffrage; by the supreme judiciary, who
proclaimed the future Constitution; by the clergy and the aristocracy,
in the most solemn pledges of the electoral period; by the British
example, celebrated by Montesquieu and Voltaire; by the more cogent
example of America; by the national classics, who declared, with a
hundred tongues, that all authority must be controlled, that the
masses must be rescued from degradation, and the individual from
constraint.

When the Commons appeared at Versailles, they were there to claim an
inheritance of which, by universal consent, they had been wrongfully
deprived. They were not arrayed against the king, who had been already
brought to submission by blows not dealt by them. They desired to make
terms with those to whom he was ostensibly opposed. There could be no
real freedom for them until they were as free on the side of the
nobles as on that of the Crown. The modern absolutism of the monarch
had surrendered; but the ancient owners of the soil remained, with
their exclusive position in the State, and a complicated system of
honours and exactions which humiliated the middle class and pauperised
the lower. The educated democracy, acting for themselves, might have
been content with the retrenchment of those privileges which put them
at a disadvantage. But the rural population were concerned with every
fragment of obsolete feudalism that added to the burden of their
lives.

The two classes were undivided. Together they had elected their
deputies, and the cleavage between the political and the social
democrat, which has become so great a fact in modern society, was
scarcely perceived. The same common principle, the same comprehensive
term, composed the policy of both. They demanded liberty, both in the
State and in society, and required that oppression should cease,
whether exercised in the name of the king or in the name of the
aristocracy. In a word, they required equality as well as liberty, and
sought deliverance from feudalism and from absolutism at the same
time. And equality was the most urgent and prominent claim of the two,
because the king, virtually, had given way, but the nobles had not.

Th