nia preceded France in solving the problem of feudalism.
Arthur Young affirms that the measures of the Grand Duke Leopold had,
in ten years, doubled the produce of Tuscany; at Milan, Count Firmian
was accounted one of the best administrators in Europe. It was a
Milanese, Beccaria, who, by his reform of criminal law, became a
leader of French opinion. Continental jurisprudence had long been
overshadowed by two ideas: that torture is the surest method of
discovering truth, and that punishment deters not by its justice, its
celerity, or its certainty, but in proportion to its severity. Even in
the eighteenth century the penal system of Maria Theresa and Joseph
II. was barbarous. Therefore no attack was more surely aimed at the
heart of established usage than that which dealt with courts of
justice. It forced men to conclude that authority was odiously stupid
and still more odiously ferocious, that existing governments were
accursed, that the guardians and ministers of law, divine and human,
were more guilty than their culprits. The past was branded as the
reign of infernal powers, and charged with long arrears of unpunished
wrong. As there was no sanctity left in law, there was no mercy for
its merciless defenders; and if they fell into avenging hands, their
doom would not exceed their desert. Men afterwards conspicuous by
their violence, Brissot and Marat, were engaged in this campaign of
humanity, which raised a demand for authorities that were not vitiated
by the accumulation of infamy, for new laws, new powers, a new
dynasty.

As religion was associated with cruelty, it is at this point that the
movement of new Ideas became a crusade against Christianity. A book by
the Cure Meslier, partially known at that time, but first printed by
Strauss in 1864, is the clarion of vindictive unbelief; and another
abbe, Raynal, hoped that the clergy would be crushed beneath the ruins
of their altars.

Thus the movement which began, in Fenelon's time, with warnings and
remonstrance and the zealous endeavour to preserve, which produced one
great scheme of change by the Crown and another at the expense of the
Crown, ended in the wild cry for vengeance and a passionate appeal to
fire and sword. So many lines of thought converging on destruction
explain the agreement that existed when the States-General began, and
the explosion that followed the reforms of '89, and the ruins of '93.
No conflict can be more irreconcilable than that betwe