s as beautiful as
anywhere; and the reader, as a general son of Adam,--proud to see human
intellect and heroism slaying that kind of lions, and doing what
in certain sad epochs is unanimously voted to be impossible and
unattemptable,--exults along with him; and perhaps whispers to his own
poor heart, nearly choked by the immeasurable imbroglio of Blue-books
and Parliamentary Eloquences which for the present encumber Heaven
and Earth, "MELIORA SPERO." To Mirabeau, the following details, from
first-hand, but already of twenty-three years distance, were not known,
[Appeared first in Tome v. of _"OEuvres Posthumes de Frederic II."_ (are
in Tome vi. of Preuss's Edition of OEUVRES), "Berlin, 1788;"--above a
year after Mirabeau had left.] while he sat penning those robust Essays
on the Duty of LEAVE-ALONE.

"To form an idea of the general subversion," says the King, in regard
to 1763, "and how great were the desolation and discouragement, you must
represent to yourself Countries entirely ravaged, the very traces of
the old habitations hardly discoverable; Towns, some ruined from top to
bottom, others half destroyed by fire;--13,000 Houses, of which the
very vestiges were gone. No field in seed; no grain for the food of the
inhabitants; 60,000 horses needed, if there was to be ploughing carried
on: in the Provinces generally Half a Million Population (500,000) less
than in 1756,--that is to say, upon only Four Millions and a Half, the
ninth man was wanting. Noble and Peasant had been pillaged, ransomed,
foraged, eaten out by so many different Armies; nothing now left them
but life and miserable rags.

"There was no credit, by trading people, even for the daily necessaries
of life." And furthermore, what we were not prepared for, "No police in
the Towns: to habits of equity and order had succeeded a vile greed of
gain and an anarchic disorder. The Colleges of Justice and of Finance
had, by these frequent invasions of so many enemies, been reduced to
inaction:" no Judge, in many places not even a Tax-gatherer: the silence
of the Laws had produced in the people a taste for license; boundless
appetite for gain was their main rule of action: the noble, the
merchant, the farmer, the laborer, raising emulously each the price of
his commodity, seemed to endeavor only for their mutual ruin. Such, when
the War ended, was the fatal spectacle over these Provinces, which had
once been so flourishing: however pathetic the description may be