s in Germany
as a law of the Empire, the same monarchy under Louis the Thirteenth had
force enough to destroy the republican system of the Protestants at
home.

Louis the Sixteenth was a diligent reader of history. But the very lamp
of prudence blinded him. The guide of human life led him astray. A
silent revolution in the moral world preceded the political, and
prepared it. It became of more importance than ever what examples were
given, and what measures wore adopted. Their causes no longer lurked in
the recesses of cabinets or in the private conspiracies of the factious.
They were no longer to be controlled by the force and influence of the
grandees, who formerly had been able to stir up troubles by their
discontents and to quiet them by their corruption. The chain of
subordination, even in cabal and sedition, was broken in its most
important links. It was no longer the great and the populace. Other
interests were formed, other dependencies, other connections, other
communications. The middle classes had swelled far beyond their former
proportion. Like whatever is the most effectively rich and great in
society, these classes became the seat of all the active politics, and
the preponderating weight to decide on them. There were all the energies
by which fortune is acquired; there the consequence of their success.
There were all the talents which assert their pretensions, and are
impatient of the place which settled society prescribes to them. These
descriptions had got between the great and the populace; and the
influence on the lower classes was with them. The spirit of ambition had
taken possession of this class as violently as ever it had done of any
other. They felt the importance of this situation. The correspondence of
the moneyed and the mercantile world, the literary intercourse of
academies, but above all, the press, of which they had in a manner
entire possession, made a kind of electric communication everywhere. The
press, in reality, has made every government, in its spirit, almost
democratic. Without the great, the first movements in this revolution
could not, perhaps, have been given. But the spirit of ambition, now for
the first time connected with the spirit of speculation, was not to be
restrained at will. There was no longer any means of arresting a
principle in its course. When Louis the Sixteenth, under the influence
of the enemies to monarchy, meant to found but one republic, he set up
two; when