le in beating back those
many and great wrongs? Wrong has often a quick, spasmodic force; but was
there not in _his_ arm a steady growing force, which could only be a
force of right?

V. His _Faults in Policy_ crystallized about one: for, while he subdued
the serf-mastering nobility, he struck no final blow at the serf-system
itself.

Our running readers of French history need here a word of caution. They
follow De Tocqueville, and De Tocqueville follows Biot in speaking of
the serf-system as abolished in most of France hundreds of years before
this. But Biot and De Tocqueville take for granted a knowledge in their
readers that the essential vileness of the system, and even many of its
most shocking outward features, remained.

Richelieu might have crushed the serf-system, really, as easily as Louis
X. and Philip the Long had crushed it nominally. This Richelieu did not.

And the consequences of this great man's great fault were terrible.
Hardly was he in his grave, when the nobles perverted the effort of
the Paris Parliament for advance in liberty, and took the lead in the
fearful revolts and massacres of the Fronde. Then came Richelieu's
pupil, Mazarin, who tricked the nobles into order, and Mazarin's pupil,
Louis XIV., who bribed them into order. But a nobility borne on high by
the labor of a servile class must despise labor; so there came those
weary years of indolent gambling and debauchery and "serf-eating" at
Versailles.

Then came Louis XV., who was too feeble to maintain even the poor decent
restraints imposed by Louis XIV.; so the serf-mastering caste became
active in a new way, and their leaders in vileness unutterable became at
last Fronsac and De Sade.

Then came "the deluge." The spirit of the serf-mastering caste, as left
by Richelieu, was a main cause of the miseries which brought on the
French Revolution. When the Third Estate brought up their "portfolio of
grievances," for one complaint against the exactions of the monarchy
there were fifty complaints against the exactions of the nobility.[D]

[Footnote D: See any _Resume des Cahiers_,--even the meagre ones in
Buchez and Roux, or Le Bas, or Cheruel.]

Then came the failure of the Revolution in its direct purpose; and of
this failure the serf-mastering caste was a main cause. For this caste,
hardened by ages of domineering over a servile class, despite fourth of
August renunciations, would not, could not, accept a position compatible
with free