progress, we must in either case perceive that its forces were not exhausted nor its activity terminated, with the Empire, or at the restoration of the old dynasty to the French throne. The history of Europe since the Treaties of Vienna has been little else than the history of their abrogation; in other words, of the revival and spread of that Revolution which they were believed to have finally quelled. Old dynasties, old divisions of classes, old forms of privileged government survive, but little political foresight is needed to disclose that they are all doomed, and that they are only endured as temporary resting-places on an onward road. The conception of finality and equilibrium might seem to have vanished from the midst of every nation in Europe. Every statesman recognises more or less frankly the transitory character of the system which he for the hour administers and upholds. Everywhere we discern the hand and hearken to the tread of the Revolution.

To insist upon identifying this general and continuous movement with the first phase of it, is as misleading and as inadequate as it would be to conceive the Reformation as covered and wholly comprehended in the single history of Luther or of Calvin, of Cranmer or of Knox. In considering the successive

epochs of the French Revolution, for we may speak of the rapidly crowded transactions of these eight or ten years as if they extended over many generations, as indeed in a sense they are doing, it is our constant business to separate in them that which was accident of time or place or person, from that which belonged to the spirit and essence of the movement. Each aspect of it claims investigation and thought; but in watching the sets of events as they followed one another with impetuous haste, let us beware of putting a finger upon this set or that,-upon the acts of the Constituent Assembly, of the Commune, of the Legislative, of the Convention; upon the fall of the Bastille, or the death of the King, or the Terror; upon Mirabeau or Marat, upon Danton or Robespierre,—and exclaiming that here then was the Revolution. The more attentively we study the character of the chiefs who came to the surface and then swiftly disappeared, and the more thoroughly we grasp the meaning of those situations, each of which seems to be so critical and decisive, the more irresistibly is the conviction borne in upon us that the spirit of the Revolution was something above all these and beside them. Would the King in exile have been more dangerous than was the spectre of the King guillotined? If Mirabeau had lived,

would he by some constitutional system have gratified the passion of the nation and at the same time have soothed the fears and pride of the King and Queen? Or was his design first to level all distinctions of rank and class, to abolish privileges, to destroy local franchises, immunities, and usages, and thus by equalizing all else to leave the royal power supreme, with himself to play the part of Richelieu? What was the secret of the weakness and fall of the Girondins? What is the true theory of the Terror, or are we to believe that it was a mere insane outbreak of cruel frenzy? Under what influences did the ideas of the political structure raised by the Convention fall away before Napoleon? There are a hundred questions of this kind, questions of the deepest historic interest and instruction. Apart, in the background of them all, and overshadowing them all, moves a gigantic, impalpable, impersonal spirit, the Revolution.

It is often regretted by the liberal thinkers of England and of Italy, that circumstances brought the great European movement of the eighteenth century to a head in France, rather than in some other country. The French, it is said, were not prepared. Sunk in despotism, how should they know the uses and conditions of liberty? It would be fairer, as it seems to

me, to attribute the disastrous failure of the Revolution in France, not so much to her unfitness for liberty, as to the still more imperfect preparation of her neighbours. It was the enmity of the retrograde powers of Europe which first drove her into the excesses natural to panic, and then by their flagitious designs aroused that military temper, which eventually slew her newborn freedom. The early simplicity and ignorance of the outside world which made the first movers in the Revolution suppose that other nations would rejoice with France over her newly-gotten gifts, was in one sense a token of unpreparedness. But all the circumstances connected with it are marked with that kind of indiscretion which is single-minded, generous, and even touching. Historians appear to be more and more agreed that it was the repulse of this spirit, together with the attitude taken by the continental sovereigns, which filled the nation first with anger, and then with an ever-present, irrational, and as Mr. Carlyle has called it, absolutely preternatural, suspicion.

The researches of philosophers have shown abundantly why it was that the inevitable outbreak of the century which had been prefigured by unmistakeable signs, like the abolition of the Order of Jesuits, the attempted reforms of Joseph II., and numberless other

incidents of equal significance, took place in France rather than elsewhere. De Tocqueville's work on the Ancient Régime proves that the condition of the French population was not worse, but better, than that of the rest of continental Europe, and that it was this very superiority which made them chafe more restlessly against the relics of feudal privileges. It was the alleviation of the burdens, which made them seem so intolerable. The old régime had been more strikingly reformed in the districts round Paris than elsewhere, while it pressed with unaltered weight upon Brittany, yet Paris was the heart of the Revolution, and Brittany its hottest enemy. He proves next that the system of centralization, which has been usually believed, alike by those who love it and those who hate it, to be the product of the Revolution, was in truth the very keystone of the old system of administration, and that this, among other effects, gave an important predominance to the capital city which you could find in no other state-a predominance big with consequences for the nation. Again, the literary class in France, unlike the purely studious German on the one hand, and the mixed political and practical character of the man of letters in England on the other, were not purely speculative, while still the institutions of the old régime