ilege of commanding armies, the hunting privileges,
the warren, the dovecot, serfage, were sacrificed on the altar of
patriotic regeneration. The burden of the centuries was suddenly
lifted from the shoulders of _Jacques Bonhomme_.

The men who proposed this surrender of their rights, who had already,
by joining the Tiers, done so much to accomplish the great social
revolution, deserve greater consideration as a class than history has,
as a rule, meted out to them. The French nobility at the close of the
18th century counted in its ranks a great number of admirable men,
admirable for loyalty, for intellectuality, for generosity. It is true
that the most conspicuous, those who made up the Court, or who secured
the lucrative appointments, had caught the plague of Versailles, and
that even, in the provincial nobility there was much copying of the
fashion of the courtiers. But there were other {78} representatives of
the order. Most conspicuous was that large class of liberal nobles who
played so great a part in the early days of the Revolution. The ten
deputies elected by the nobility of Paris to the States-General all
belonged to that category: grave, educated men, writers and thinkers,
versed in questions of politics, economics, religion and education,
experienced in many details of practical government, soldiers and local
administrators, penetrated with the thought of a protesting and
humanitarian age. Some, like La Fayette, had played conspicuous roles,
and proved revolution in the making; others, like La Rochefoucauld, had
mastered every intricacy of political and philanthropic thought; and
some, like Condorcet, had proved themselves among the masters of
science of their time. Counts, marquises, dukes, they were prepared to
lay all aside in the overwhelming demand which suffering humanity made
for release from all its troubles. And alongside of these, more loyal
to their King if less loyal to humanity, no less admirable if lagging a
little in knowledge and development, were those hundreds of country
gentlemen, many of them poor, who, when the day of adversity came,
rallied to their sovereigns, faced the guillotine for them, or laid
down their lives {79} following the fearless standard of Henri de La
Rochejacquelein. The position of the French nobility, and the part it
played, has been too much forgotten. Its most intelligent section
nearly led the Revolution, which later fell into the hands of lawyers
and t