excellent translation.  Every student of history is, of course, well acquainted with that book.  But as there is reason to fear, from language which is becoming once more too common, both in speech and writing, that the general public either do not know it, or have not understood it, I shall take the liberty of quoting from it somewhat largely.  I am justified in so doing by the fact that M. de Tocqueville’s book is founded on researches into the French Archives, which have been made (as far as I am aware) only by him; and contains innumerable significant facts, which are to be found (as far as I am aware) in no other accessible work.

The French people—says M. de Tocqueville—made, in 1789, the greatest effort which was ever made by any nation to cut, so to speak, their destiny in halves, and to separate by an abyss that which they had heretofore been, from that which they sought to become hereafter.  But he had long thought that they had succeeded in this singular attempt much less than was supposed abroad; and less than they had at first supposed themselves.  He was convinced that they had unconsciously retained, from the former state of society, most of the sentiments, the habits, and even the opinions, by means of which they had effected the destruction of that state of things; and that, without intending it, they had used its remains to rebuild the edifice of modern society.  This is his thesis, and this he proves, it seems to me, incontestably by documentary evidence.  Not only does he find habits which we suppose—or supposed till lately—to have died with the eighteenth century, still living and working, at least in France, in the nineteenth, but the new opinions which we look on usually as the special children of the nineteenth century, he shows to have been born in the eighteenth.  France, he considers, is still at heart what the Ancien Régime made her.

He shows that the hatred of the ruling caste, the intense determination to gain and keep equality, even at the expense of liberty, had been long growing up, under those influences of which I spoke in my first lecture.

He shows, moreover, that the acquiescence in a centralised administration; the expectation that the government should do everything for the people, and nothing for themselves; the consequent loss of local liberties, local peculiarities; the helplessness of the towns and the parishes: and all which issued in making Paris France, and subjecting the whole of a vast country to the arbitrary dictates of a knot of despots in the capital, was not the fruit of the Revolution, but of the Ancien Régime which preceded it; and that Robespierre and his “Comité de Salut Public,” and commissioners sent forth to the four winds of heaven in bonnet rouge and carmagnole complete, to build up and pull down, according to their wicked will, were only handling, somewhat more roughly, the same wires which had been handled for several generations by the Comptroller-General and Council of State, with their provincial intendants.

“Do you know,” said Law to the Marquis d’Argenson, “that this kingdom of France is governed by thirty intendants?  You have neither parliament, nor estates, nor governors.  It is upon thirty masters of request, despatched into the provinces, that their evil or their good, their fertility or their sterility, entirely depend.”

To do everything for the people, and let them do nothing for themselves—this was the Ancien Régime.  To be more wise and more loving than Almighty God, who certainly does not do everything for the sons of men, but forces them to labour for themselves by bitter need, and after a most Spartan mode of education; who allows them to burn their hands as often as they are foolish enough to put them into the fire; and to be filled with the fruits of their own folly, even though the folly be one of necessary ignorance; treating them with that seeming neglect which is after all the most provident care, because by it alone can men be trained to experience, self-help, science, true humanity; and so become not tolerably harmless dolls, but men and women worthy of the name; with

The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
The perfect spirit, nobly planned
To cheer, to counsel, and command.

Such seems to be the education and government appointed for man by the voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatum, and the education, therefore, which the man of science will accept and carry out.  But the men of the Ancien Régime—in as far as it was a Régime at all—tried to be wiser than the Almighty.  Why not?  They were not the first, nor will be the last, by many who have made the same attempt.  So this Council of State settled arbitrarily, not only taxes, and militia, and roads, but anything and everything.  Its members meddled, with their whole hearts and minds.  They tried to teach agriculture by schools and pamphlets and prizes; they sent out plans for every public work.  A town could not establish an octroi, levy a rate, mortgage, sell, sue, farm, or administer their property, without an order in council.  The Government ordered public rejoicings, saw to the firing of salutes, and illuminating of houses—in one case mentioned by M. de Tocqueville, they fined a member of the burgher guard for absenting himself from a Te Deum.  All self-government was gone.  A country parish was, says Turgot, nothing but “an assemblage of cabins, and of inhabitants as passive as the cabins they dwelt in.”  Without an order of council, the parish could not mend the steeple after a storm, or repair the parsonage gable.  If they grumbled at the intendant, he threw some of the chief persons into prison, and made the parish pay the expenses of the horse patrol, which formed the arbitrary police of France.  Everywhere was meddling.  There were reports on statistics—circumstantial, inaccurate, and useless—as statistics are too often wont to be.  Sometimes, when the people were starving, the Government sent down charitable donations to certain parishes, on condition that the inhabitants should raise a sum on their part.  When the sum offered was sufficient, the Comptroller-General wrote on the margin, when he returned the report to the intendant, “Good—express satisfaction.”  If it was more than sufficient, he wrote, “Good—express satisfaction and sensibility.”  There is nothing new under the sun.  In 1761, the Government, jealous enough of newspapers, determined to start one for itself, and for that purpose took under its tutelage the Gazette de France.  So the public newsmongers were of course to be the provincial intendants, and their sub-newsmongers, of course, the sub-delegates.

But alas! the poor sub-delegates seem to have found either very little news, or very little which it was politic to publish.  One reports that a smuggler of salt has been hung, and has displayed great courage; another that a woman in his district has had three girls at a birth; another that a dreadful storm has happened, but—has done no mischief; a fourth—living in some specially favoured Utopia—declares that in spite of all his efforts he has found nothing worth recording, but that he himself will subscribe to so useful a journal, and will exhort all respectable persons to follow his example: in spite of which loyal endeavours, the journal seems to have proved a failure, to the great disgust of the king and his minister, who had of course expected to secure fine weather by nailing, like the schoolboy before a holiday, the hand of the weather-glass.

Well had it been, if the intermeddling of this bureaucracy had stopped there.  But, by a process of evocation (as it was called), more and more causes, criminal as well as civil, were withdrawn from the regular tribunals, to those of the intendants and the Council.  Before the intendant all the lower order of people were generally sent for trial.  Bread-riots were a common cause of such trials, and M. de Tocqueville asserts