ernally against the enemy. Less
calm in disposition and more given to pleasure than the rural nobles
of Prussia, under slacker discipline and in the midst of greater
worldliness, but more genial, more courteous and more liberal-minded,
the twenty-six thousand noble families of France upheld in their sons
the traditions and prejudices, the habits and aptitudes, those energies
of body, heart and mind[4166] through which the Prussian "junkers" were
able to constitute the Prussian army, organize the German army and make
Germany the first power of Europe.

IV. The Clergy.

Where recruited.--Professional inducements.--Independence of
ecclesiastics.--Their substantial merits.--Their theoretical
and practical information.--Their distribution over the
territory.--Utility of their office.--Their conduct in
1790-1800.--Their courage, their capacity for self-sacrifice.

Likewise in the Church where nearly all its staff, the whole of the
lower and middle-class clergy, cures, vicars, canons and collegiate
chaplains, teachers or directors of schools, colleges and seminaries,
more than sixty-five thousand ecclesiastics, formed a healthy, well
organized body, worthily fulfilling its duties.

"I do not know," says de Tocqueville,[4167] "all in all, and
notwithstanding the vices of some of its members, if there ever was in
the world a more remarkable clergy than the Catholic clergy of France
when the Revolution took them by surprise, more enlightened, more
national, less entrenched behind their private virtues, better endowed
with public virtues, and, at the same time, more strong in the faith.
... I began the study of the old social system full of prejudices
against them; I finish it full of respect for them."

And first, which is a great point, most of the incumbents in the
town parishes, in the three hundred collegial churches, in the small
canonicates of the cathedral chapters, belonged to better families than
at the present day.[4168] Children were then more numerous, not
merely among the peasants, but among the inferior nobles and the upper
bourgeoisie; each family, accordingly, was glad to have one of its sons
take orders, and no constraint was necessary to bring this about.
The ecclesiastical profession then had attractions which it no longer
possesses; it had none of the inconveniences incident to it at the
present time. A priest was not exposed to democratic distrust and
hostility; he was sur