class that won the
battles of the third estate; that took the Bastille, and made France a
constitutional monarchy; that took the Tuileries, and made France a
Republic. They claimed their reward. The middle class, having cast down
the upper orders with the aid of the lower, instituted a new inequality
and a privilege for itself. By means of a taxpaying qualification it
deprived its confederates of their vote. To those, therefore, who had
accomplished the Revolution, its promise was not fulfilled. Equality did
nothing for them. The opinion, at that time, was almost universal, that
society is founded on an agreement which is voluntary and conditional,
and that the links which bind men to it are terminable, for sufficient
reason, like those which subject them to authority. From these popular
premises the logic of Marat drew his sanguinary conclusions. He told
the famished people that the conditions on which they had consented to
bear their evil lot, and had refrained from violence, had not been kept
to them. It was suicide, it was murder, to submit to starve and to see
one's children starving, by the fault of the rich. The bonds of society
were dissolved by the wrong it inflicted. The state of nature had come
back, in which every man had a right to what he could take. The time had
come for the rich to make way for the poor. With this theory of
equality, liberty was quenched in blood, and Frenchmen became ready to
sacrifice all other things to save life and fortune.

Twenty years after the splendid opportunity that opened in 1789, the
reaction had triumphed everywhere in Europe; ancient constitutions had
perished as well as new; and even England afforded them neither
protection nor sympathy. The liberal, at least the democratic revival,
came from Spain. The Spaniards fought against the French for a king, who
was a prisoner in France. They gave themselves a constitution, and
placed his name at the head of it. They had a monarchy, without a king.
It required to be so contrived that it would work in the absence,
possibly the permanent absence, of the monarch. It became, therefore, a
monarchy only in name, composed, in fact, of democratic forces. The
constitution of 1812 was the attempt of inexperienced men to accomplish
the most difficult task in politics. It was smitten with sterility. For
many years it was the standard of abortive revolutions among the
so-called Latin nations. It promulgated the notion of a king who should
fl