t commands, but of the nation that obeys. It was the very
marrow of the doctrine that obstruction of liberty is crime, that
absolute authority is not a thing to be consulted, but a thing to be
removed, and that resistance to it is no affair of interest or
convenience, but of sacred obligation. Every drop of blood shed in the
American conflict was shed in a cause immeasurably inferior to theirs,
against a system more legitimate by far than that of June 23. Unless
Washington was an assassin, it was their duty to oppose, if it might
be, by policy, if it must be, by force, the mongrel measure of
concession and obstinacy which the Court had carried against the
proposals of Necker. That victory was reversed, and the success of the
Commons was complete. They had brought the three orders into one; they
had compelled the king to retract his declaration and to restore his
disgraced minister; they had exposed the weakness of their oppressors,
and they had the nation at their back.

On June 27, in the united Assembly, Mirabeau delivered an address of
mingled triumph and conciliation, which was his first act of
statesmanship. He said that the speech from the throne contained large
and generous views that proved the genuine liberality of the king. He
desired to receive them gratefully without the drawbacks imposed by
unthinking advisers, and to respect the just rights of the _noblesse_.
He took the good without the evil, extricating Lewis from his
entanglement, and tracing the line by which he might have advanced to
great results. "The past," he said, "has been the history of wild
beasts. We are inaugurating the history of men; for we have no weapon
but discussion, and no adversary but prejudice."

Their victory brought loss as well as gain to the Commons, and there
was reason to think that the counsel of Sieyes, to let the other
orders take their own separate course, was founded on wisdom. Their
opponents, joining under compulsion, had the means as well as the will
of doing them injury.

For the clergy there was a brief season of popular favour. The country
priests, sprung from the peasantry, and poorly off, shared many of
their feelings. The patronage of the State went to men of birth; and
one of these, the Archbishop of Aix, had proclaimed his belief that,
if anybody was to be exempt from taxation, it ought to be the
impoverished layman, not the wealthy ecclesiastic. When it chanced
that the Committee of Constitution was electe