object of this convocation, on the part of the government, was to relieve the finances, by diminishing the exemptions of the privileged orders, it would have rendered the whole scheme vain, to have given such a form to the Assembly as would have secured to these orders the absolute command of its deliberations. M. Neckar, therefore, and a great part of the king's council, were disposed to listen to the applications that were made from all parts of the kingdom for a double representation of the commons. The parliaments, and most of the nobility, were against it. Their opposition, however, was disregarded; the double representation was granted; and another question, of still greater importance, presented itself for the consideration of the government.

By the ancient constitution of the States-General, the three different orders of clergy, nobility, and commons assembled in separate chambers, and took each of them their resolutions apart. The Third Estate was sure to be outvoted, therefore, in every question where the interest of the privileged order was concerned; and the additional number of their representatives would not have secured them from insignificance, if this plan of deliberation had been adhered to. The same circumstances, therefore, that, by raising their consideration, and increasing their importance in the community, had entitled them to obtain a double representation, seemed obviously to require, that the ancient form of convocation should be abandoned, and that their voice should not be entirely without effect in the great assembly of the nation. Notwithstanding the incalculable importance of adjusting this matter by some vigorous and immediate resolution, M. Mounier assures us, that the deputies were allowed to repair to Versailles, and the assembly of the States to be opened, before the king's ministers had come to any determination on the subject. It was known, at the same time, that one part of the deputies had been positively instructed by their constituents to contend for the ancient constitution of the States; while others had been directed to agree to nothing but the re-union of the Three Orders in one deliberative assembly.

The Chancellor de Barentin, in opening the session, congratulated the Third Estate upon the double representation they had so happily obtained, expressed his wishes for the agreement of the Three Orders to a joint deliberation, and ended by recommending it to them to begin by deliberating apart! M. Neckar held the same irresolute and inconsistent language; and each party conceived that the administration would decide ultimately in its favour. This state of uncertainty only exasperated their prejudices, and fomented their mutual animosity. The ministry wavered and temporised. M. Neckar at last proposed that they should deliberate together, at least upon the question of their future organisation. The expedient was probably futile; but it was not put to the test of experiment. After it had been approved of in council, it was suddenly retracted by the influence of a party immediately about the person of the king; and a peremptory order issued for the separation and independence of the three orders of represen→ tatives. To prepare for the promulgation of this edict, a guard was appointed to exclude the representatives of the Third Estate from the usual place of their meeting. They believed that the council had determined on their dissolution: they adjourned to a tennis-court in the neighbourhood; and, in the enthusiasm of alarm, took the celebrated oath, never to separate till a legal constitution had been established. M. Mounier acknowledges that this oath was fraught with danger to the prerogatives of royalty; but he

VOL. V.

denies that it was taken in an assembly of republicans; and justifies it, upon the ground of the emergency and alarm by which it was dictated. The councils of the king wanted that firmness that had been shown by the representatives of the people; the re-union of the orders was decreed; and the king commanded the privileged deputies to deliberate along with those of the Tiers Etat.

In all these transactions (says M. Mounier), the philosophers had no participation; they were the result of contending interests, and the consequences of a political conjuncture, to which no parallel could be found in the history of the world; they were the fruits, in a particular manner, of that improvidence and presumption, that neglected the signs of the times, and disdained to provide for events which it chose to consider as impossible. A revolution, however, was already accomplished; and it might have terminated happily at this point, had it not been for fresh imprudences of which the government was guilty.

In spite of the dissensions by which they had been preceded, the first meetings of the National Assembly gave the greatest indications of returning harmony and order. The friends of monarchy, and the advocates for moderation, constituted the great majority, both in that assembly and in the nation. The aristocratical counsellors, however, by whom the king was surrounded in secret, destroyed this fair prospect of tranquillity they persuaded him to try the effects of terror; they surrounded the metropolis with armies; they dismissed the popular ministers with insult, and replaced them by the avowed advocates of the prerogative. The populace, full of indignation and apprehension at the military array with which they were surrounded, rose in a tumultuous manner, and demolished the Bastille ; a great part of the troops declared for the popular side of the question; the people flew to arms in every part of the country; and the king was once more obliged to submit. The triumph which the lower orders had now obtained, and the dangers they had escaped, inflamed their presumption and their prejudices: the nobility and the higher clergy became the objects of their jealousy and aversion. Men were found in the Assembly, who were capable of employing those terrible passions as the instruments of their own elevation, and of purchasing a dangerous popularity, by the indiscriminate persecution of the aristocracy. Though these incendiaries did not at first exceed the number of 80, in an assembly of 800, their audacity, their activity, the terror of their associates among the rabble, and the disunion of those by whose co-operation they should have been opposed, gave them a fatal ascendency in the capital, and enabled them, at length, to subject every part of the government to their will. Then followed the outrages of the 5th and 6th of October; the king's flight to Varennes; and the establishment of the republic in bloodshed and injustice.

Such, according to this author, was the true course and progress of the revolution, and such the causes to which it ought to be ascribed. The speculative writings of philosophers had as little to do with it as the lodges of Freemasonry. The first steps were taken by men who detested the philosophers as infidels, or despised them as visionaries; the last, by men to whom all philosophy was unknown, and who pretended to use no finer instruments of persuasion than the purse and the dagger.

This account is certainly entitled to the praise of great clearness and simplicity, and cannot be denied to have a foundation in truth; but it appears to us to be deficient in profundity and extent, and to leave the revolution, in

a great measure, to be accounted for, after all these causes have been enumerated and recognised. The finances of a nation may be disordered, we conceive, or its representatives assembled, without subverting its constitution.

The different orders of the State may disagree, and grow angry in support of their respective pretensions, without tearing the frame of society to pieces, and obliterating every vestige of ancient regulation. The circumstances enumerated by M. Mounier seem to us to be only the occasions and immediate symptoms of disorder, and not the efficient and ultimate causes. To produce the effects that we have witnessed, there must have been a revolutionary spirit fermenting in the minds of the people, which took advantage of those occurrences, and converted them into engines for its own diffusion and increase. M. Mounier, in short, has given us rather an history of the revolution, than an account of its causes; he has stated events as depending upon one another, which actually proceeded from one common principle; and thought he was explaining the origin of a disorder, when he was only investigating the circumstances that had determined its eruption to one particular member.

He has thus accounted for the revolution, it seems to us, in no other way than an historian would account for an invasion, by describing the route of the assailing army, enumerating the stations they occupied, the defiles that were abandoned to them, and the bridges they broke up in their rear; while he neglected to inform us in what places the invaders had been assembled, by whom they had been trained and enlisted, and how they had been supplied with arms, and intelligence, and audacity. He has stated, as the first causes of the revolution, circumstances that really proved it to be begun; and has gone no farther back than to the earliest of its apparent effects. He has mistaken the cataracts that broke the stream, for the fountains from which it rose; and contented himself with referring the fruit to the blossom, without taking any account of the germination of the seed, or the subterraneous windings of the root.

It is in many cases, we will confess, a matter of great difficulty to distinguish between the predisposing and occasional causes of a complicated political event, or to determine in how far those circumstances that have facilitated its production, were really indispensable to its existence. In the question of which we are now treating, however, there does not appear to be any such nicety. M. Mounier maintains, that the revolution was occasioned entirely by the financial embarrassments of France, by the convocation of the States-General, and the irresolution of the royal councils. The question therefore is not, whether the revolution could have been accomplished without these occurrences; but whether these are sufficient to account for it of themselves; and whether they leave nothing to be imputed to the influence of the preachers of liberty, and the writings of republican philosophers.

Now, upon this question, we profess to entertain an opinion not less decided than that of M. Mounier, though it happens to be diametrically opposite. Had there been no previous tendency to a revolution in France, the government might have declared a bankruptcy, without endangering the foundations of the throne; and the people would have remained quiet and submissive spectators of the quarrels between the ministers and the parliaments, and of the convocation and dissolution of the States-General themselves. This, indeed, is expressly the sentiment of M. Mounier himself (p. 29); and it is justified by all preceding experience. But if

events might have happened in 1690, without endangering the monarchy, that were found sufficient to subvert it in 1790, it is natural to enquire, from what this difference has proceeded? all parties, it is believed, will agree in the answer. It proceeded from the change that had taken place in the condition and sentiments of the people; from the progress of commercial opulence; from the diffusion of information, and the prevalence of political discussion. Now, it seems difficult to deny that the philosophers were instrumental in bringing about this change; that they had attracted the public attention to the abuses of government, and spread very widely among the people the sentiment of their grievances and their rights. M. Mounier himself informs us, that, for some time before the revolution, the French nation" had been enamoured of the idea of liberty, without understanding very well what it meant, and without being conscious that they were so soon to have an opportunity of attaining it. When that opportunity offered itself," he adds, "it was seized with an enthusiastic eagerness that paralysed all the nerves of the sovereign." He acknowledges also, that the deputies of the Tiers Etat were enabled to disobey the royal mandate for their separation, and to triumph in that disobedience, only because the public opinion was so decidedly in their favour, that nobody could be found who would undertake to disperse them by violence.

Now, if it be true, that for upwards of twenty years before this period, this love of liberty had been inculcated with much zeal and little prudence, in many eloquent and popular publications, and that the names and the maxims of those writers were very much in the mouths of those who patronised the subversion of royalty in that country, is it not reasonable to presume, that some part of this enthusiasm for liberty, and some part of that popular favour for those who were supposed to be its champions, by means of which it is allowed that the Revolution was accomplished, may be attributed to the influence of those publications?

We do not wish to push this argument far; we are conscious that many other causes contributed to excite, in the minds of the people, those ideas of independence and reform by which the revolution was effected. The constant example, and increasing intimacy with England-the contagion caught in America-and above all, the advances that had been made in opulence and information, by those classes of the people to whom the exemptions and pretensions of the privileged orders were most obnoxiousall co-operated to produce a spirit of discontent and innovation, and to increase their dislike and impatience of the defects and abuses of their government. In considering a question of this kind, it should never be forgotten that it had many defects, and was liable to manifold abuses; but for this very reason, the writers who aggravated these defects, and held out these abuses to detestation, were the more likely to make an impression. To say that they made none, and that all the zeal that was testified in France against despotism, and in favour of liberty, was the natural and spontaneous result of reflection and feeling in the minds of those whom it actuated, is to make an assertion which does not sound probable, and certainly has not been proved. That writings, capable of exciting it, existed, and were read, seems not to be contested upon any hand: it is somewhat paradoxical to contend, that they had yet no share in its excitation. If Molière could render the faculty of medicine ridiculeus by a few farces, in an age much less addicted to literature; if Voltaire could, by the mere force of writing, advance the interests of infidelity, in opposition to all the or

thodox learning of Europe; is it to be imagined, that no effect would be produced by the greatest talents in the world, employed upon a theme the most popular and seductive?

M. Mounier has asked, if we think that men require to be taught the self-evident doctrine of their rights, and their means of redress; if the Roman insurgents were led by philosophers, when they seceded to Mons Sacer; or, if the Swiss and the Dutch asserted their liberties upon the suggestion of democratical authors? We would answer, that, in small states and barbarous ages, there are abuses so gross as to be absolutely intolerable, and so qualified as to become personal to every member of the community; that orators supply the place of writers in those early ages; and that we only deny the influence of the latter, where we are assured of their nonexistence. Because a vessel may be carried along by the current, shall we deny that her progress is assisted by the breeze?

We are persuaded, therefore, that the writings of those popular philosophers who have contended for political freedom, had some share in bringing about the revolution in France; how great, or how inconsiderable a share, we are not qualified to determine, and hold it, indeed, impossible to ascertain. There are no data from which we can estimate the relative force of such an influence; nor does language afford us any terms that are fitted to express its proportions. We must be satisfied with holding that it existed, and that those who deny its operation altogether, are almost as much mistaken as those who make it account for every thing.

But though we conceive that philosophy is thus, in some degree, responsible for the French revolution, we are far from charging her with the guilt that this name implies. The writers to whom we allude may have produced effects very different from what they intended, and very different even from what their works might seem calculated to produce. An approved medicine may have occasioned convulsions and death; and the flame that was meant to enlighten, may have spread into conflagration and ruin.

M. Mounier, throughout his book, has attended too little to distinction. He has denied, for the philosophers, all participation in the fact, and has had but little interest, therefore, to justify them on the score of intention. It is a subject, however, which deserves a little consideration.

That there were defects and abuses, and some of these very gross too, in the old system of government in France, we presume will scarcely be denied. That it was lawful to wish for their removal, will probably be as readily admitted; and that the peaceful influence of philosophy, while confined to this object, was laudably and properly exerted, seems to follow as a necessary conclusion. It would not be easy, therefore, to blame those writers who have confined themselves to a dispassionate and candid statement of the advantages of a better institution; and it must seem hard to involve in the guilt of Robespierre and the Jacobins, those persons in France who aimed at nothing more than the abolition of absurd privileges, and the limitation of arbitrary power. Montesquieu, Turgot, and Raynal were probably, in some degree, dissatisfied with the government of their country, and would have rejoiced in the prospect of a reform; but it can only be the delirium of party prejudice, that would suspect them of wishing for the downfall of royalty, and for the proscriptions and equality of a reign of terror. It would be treating their accusers too much like men in their senses, to justify such. men any farther on the score of intention: yet it is possible that they may