he
monarchical reaction, under George III. In France, for reasons which
we have no room to expatiate upon, the experiments both of Sully and
of Colbert failed. The result may be read with graphic effect in the
pages of Arthur Young, both before the Revolution broke out and
again after Burke's superb rhetoric had biassed English opinion
against it.

[4] _Turgot_, _Philosophe et Economiste_. Par A. Batbie, p. 380.

M. Leonce de Lavergne, it is true, in his most interesting book upon
the Provincial Assemblies under Lewis XVI., has endeavoured to show
that in the great work of administrative reform all classes between
1778 and 1787 had shown themselves full of a liberal and practical
spirit. But even in his pages we see enough of apprehensions and
dissensions to perceive how deep was the intestine disorganisation;
and the attitude of the nobles in 1789 demonstrated how incurable it
was by any merely constitutional modifications. Sir Philip Francis,
to whom Burke submitted the proof-sheets of the Reflections, at
once with his usual rapid penetration discerned the weakness of the
anti-revolutionary position. 'The French of this day,' he told
Burke, 'could not act as we did in 1688. They had no constitution as
we had to recur to. They had no foundation to build upon. They had
no walls to repair. Much less had they "_the elements of a
constitution very nearly as good as could be wished_." A proposition
so extraordinary as this last ought to have been made out _in
limine_, since the most important deductions are drawn from it.'[5]
But, though Burke insisted on drawing his deductions from it with
sweeping impetuosity, neither he nor any one else has yet succeeded
in establishing that all-important proposition.

[5] Burke's _Correspondence_, iii. 157.

What we desire to say, then, comes, in short, to this, that M. Taine
has given an exaggerated importance to the literary and speculative
activity of the last half century of the old monarchy. In measuring
the force of the various antecedents of the Revolution, he has
assigned to books and philosophical ideas a place in the scale of
dissolvent conditions that belongs more rightly to decayed
institutions, to incompetent and incorrigible castes, to economic
incongruities that could only be dealt with trenchantly. Books and
ideas acquired a certain importance after other things had finally
broken up the crumbling system. They supplied a formula for the
accomplished fact. 'It was a