raging in the rear.

We greatly doubt whether any course which could have been pursued by
Louis the Sixteenth could have averted a great convulsion. But we are
sure that, if there was such a course, it was the course recommended
by M. Turgot. The church and the aristocracy, with that blindness to
danger, that incapacity of believing that anything can be except what
has been, which the long possession of power seldom fails to generate,
mocked at the counsel which might have saved them. They would not have
reform; and they had revolution. They would not pay a small contribution
in place of the odious corvees; and they lived to see their castles
demolished, and their lands sold to strangers. They would not endure
Turgot; and they were forced to endure Robespierre.

Then the rulers of France, as if smitten with judicial blindness,
plunged headlong into the American war. They thus committed at once two
great errors. They encouraged the spirit of revolution. They augmented
at the same time those public burdens, the pressure of which is
generally the immediate cause of revolutions. The event of the war
carried to the height the enthusiasm of speculative democrats. The
financial difficulties produced by the war carried to the height
the discontent of that larger body of people who cared little about
theories, and much about taxes.

The meeting of the States-General was the signal for the explosion of
all the hoarded passions of a century. In that assembly, there were
undoubtedly very able men. But they had no practical knowledge of the
art of government. All the great English revolutions have been conducted
by practical statesmen. The French Revolution was conducted by mere
speculators. Our constitution has never been so far behind the age as to
have become an object of aversion to the people. The English revolutions
have therefore been undertaken for the purpose of defending, correcting,
and restoring,--never for the mere purpose of destroying. Our countrymen
have always, even in times of the greatest excitement, spoken reverently
of the form of government under which they lived, and attacked only what
they regarded as its corruptions. In the very act of innovating they
have constantly appealed to ancient prescription; they have seldom
looked abroad for models; they have seldom troubled themselves with
Utopian theories; they have not been anxious to prove that liberty is a
natural right of men; they have been content to rega