e Third Estate with insolence
insufferable.

Next came the complaints and demands of the clergy. They insisted on
the adoption in France of the Decrees of the Council of Trent, and the
destruction of the liberties of the Gallican Church.

But far stronger than these came the voice of the people.

First spoke Montaigne, denouncing the grasping spirit of the nobles.
Then spoke Savaron, stinging them with sarcasm, torturing them with
rhetoric, crushing them with statements of facts.

But chief among the speakers was the President of the Third Estate,
Robert Miron, Provost of the Merchants of Paris. His speech, though
spoken across the great abyss of time and space and thought and custom
which separates him from us, warms a true man's heart even now. With
touching fidelity he pictured the sad life of the lower orders,--their
thankless toil, their constant misery; then, with a sturdiness which
awes us, he arraigned, first, royalty for its crushing taxation,--next,
the whole upper class for its oppressions,--and then, daring death, he
thus launched into popular thought an _idea_:--

"It is nothing less than a miracle that the people are able to answer so
many demands. On the labor of _their_ hands depends the maintenance
of Your Majesty, of the clergy, of the nobility, of the commons. What
without _their_ exertions would be the value of the tithes and great
possessions of the Church, of the splendid estates of the nobility,
or of our own house-rents and inheritances? With their bones scarcely
skinned over, your wretched people present themselves before you, beaten
down and helpless, with the aspect rather of death itself than of living
men, imploring your succor in the name of Him who has appointed you to
reign over them,--who made you a man, that you might be merciful to
other men,--and who made you the father of your subjects, that you might
be compassionate to these your helpless children. If Your Majesty shall
not take means for that end, _I fear lest despair should teach the
sufferers that a soldier is, after all, nothing more than a peasant
bearing arms; and lest, when the vine-dresser shall have taken up his
arquebuse, he should cease to become an anvil only that he may become a
hammer."_

After this the Third Estate demanded the convocation of a general
assembly every ten years, a more just distribution of taxes, equality
of all before the law, the suppression of interior custom-houses, the
abolition of sundry