Almost analogous to this, leaving out the question of tithes, would have been the situation of the French peasant if the agrarian laws of the constituent assembly had remained in operation. The universal feeling was such in France, however, toward the close of 1791 that a pause could not have been made at this point. The conflict between the classes had broken out when indignation against the king was at its height, and religious discords, the bluster of nobles who had taken refuge in other lands, and the imminence of a European coalition, put the finishing touch to the popular exasperation. In France the agrarian revolution was consummated in the midst of civil and on the eve of foreign war; while in England the reform had come about under peaceful conditions, as the result of a series of acts looked upon as purely business measures, having no connection with politics.

End of Feudalism

In France, while the Jacqueries were carrying on a "propaganda by deed " the revolutionary agrarian doctrines were assuming final shape; over against the "rights of nobles" were reared in threatening array the "rights of villeins." The conviction was soon reached that never could feudalism be made contractante, it must always remain not only dominante but cruelly oppressive as well. Moreover it was very necessary to decide just what revenues the nobles were to be allowed to retain. An old law of the monarchy which decreed confiscation of the estates of persons guilty of high treason, was revived and put in practice against emigrants, scarcely any distinction being made between emigrants who had actually carried arms against France, and those who had merely taken refuge in a foreign land. Nevertheless the manner in which those nobles who had remained at home were treated by the Jacobin committees of their village or of the neighbouring town was such as to turn almost every "ci-devant" into an emigrant. Thus a prodigious number of seignorial estates were turned in with the lands of the clergy to swell the national domains. These estates the peasant could now make his own if he so desired, paying for them in assignats that had already greatly depreciated, and were soon to fall to a hundredth part of

their face value.

The assembly which was to take away the property of the nobles as its predecessor had taken away that of the clergy was elected, not by universal suffrage which never came into operation during the whole course of the Revolution, but by an electoral body of which each member paid a sum equivalent to the proceeds of three days' labour. Four million two hundred and ninety-eight thousand three hundred and sixty "active" citizens composed this body which was sufficiently large to be an exact representative of the popular spirit; had it contained more members its action might not have been so energetic. It elected an assembly exactly after its own image, the legislative. It was this assembly that was to take the most rigorous measures against the nobility and clergy, to precipitate the fall of royalty, to commence the foreign war that was to react so disastrously on France, to regulate, lastly, the agrarian question and make an end of the "seigneury for all time.

By its edict of the 18th of June, 1792, the legislative assembly declared abolished without possibility of redemption all rights of whatever denomination the denominations varied according to the province-based on the mutations that might arise in the possession of property or of funds. This was equivalent to the suppression of all seignorial rights of mutation.

The assembly recognised the validity of certain casual claims which might exist by reason of a sale or concession freely agreed to by the former owner; but only on condition that the latter or his representatives could furnish proof of there having been a contract. Now proof of this kind could rarely be produced, hence the victory was nearly always on the side of the peasant.

The legislative assembly also abolished a certain number of banalités that the constituent assembly had allowed to remain in force because they were looked upon as payment for certain services the noble had rendered to the village.

The convention took still more radical measures. It abolished the casual rights that its predecessor had respected. There was no longer any question of trying to determine just what were the rights of the noble and what were the rights of the peasant; the convention denied all rights whatever to the noble, even the right to exist. Only by the total destruction of the aristocracy, by the absolute triumph of democratic principles in all the rural districts, could the Revolution be made complete and lasting. Of feudalism the name, even the very memory was to be destroyed. The assembly ordained that all papers belonging to the châteaux should be deposited in the municipal record offices, and there "burned in the presence of the municipal council and all the citizens." Isolated acts of violence, of brutal retaliation on the part of the peasants, that had hitherto been denounced and perhaps punished when circumstances permitted, were now declared to be strictly legal. Feudalism was to be hunted down wherever it existed, beyond the boundaries of France, across the seas. "The national convention decrees that no person of French birth can claim feudal rights or service in any quarter whatsoever of the globe, under pain of civil degradation” (7th of September, 1793). This meant utter ruin to French colonial property-owners in the Antilles, the Isles of France and of Bourbon.

The work is at last accomplished; there no longer remains in France a trace of feudal dominion. The legislative assembly and the convention have been partial even to the point of flagrant injustice in favour of the peasant and against the noble. The result was the creation of a rural democracy, absolved by the Revolution from the necessity of paying tithes and seignorial dues that would aggregate several hundreds of millions, and made possessor of immense "national domains," which has become the most influential factor in national affairs that exists in the world to-day.

The lawyer Mailhe, a learned feudalist and deputy to the legislative assembly from Haute-Garonne, was neither a Jacobin nor a collectivist, yet this is what he said about seignorial rights: "If their suppression in reality covered an attack on all proprietary rights, the assembly which issued the decree would be blessed by ninety-nine hundredths of the nation." The question of seignorial rights was treated both by the legislative assembly and the convention, not as a litigation between compatriots and fellowcitizens, but as a casus belli that had to be decided between two hostile castes -almost two hostile nations.

Virtually the whole of the social question lay at that epoch in the agrarian question, there being, properly speaking, no question of labour. The law of March, 1791, suppressed all corporations and trades unions with their syndics, committees, and rules, and it was believed that thereby liberty had been permanently founded in every department of labour; pharmacy and the trade of silversmith alone excepted. So little did the assembly foresee any great development of industries in France that by the law of July, 1791, it

decided that no blast furnaces could be manufactured without the authorisation of a special law. It was not long thereafter before the emigration of the rich, the excesses committed by the lower classes, the "requisitions," the law of maximum, and civil war had destroyed what little industry and commerce still subsisted in France. The cruelties of the Lyons revolt in 1793 decimated the population of that city and closed all its silk factories.

The constituent assembly in suppressing corporations had no intention of allowing them to reorganise at some future time. By the law of June 14th, 1791, it prohibited all associations and coalitions of working people formed with the object of raising funds for mutual support, or obtaining an increase in wages; and punished delinquents with fine and imprisonment. In his report the deputy, Chaspelier, justified these prohibitions by arguments drawn from a most astonishing tissue of sophistries, "Without doubt," he said, "all citizens should be allowed to assemble; but citizens belonging to certain professions should be prohibited from assembling in their own interest, since the state is able and willing to furnish work for those who subsist by it, and support for the infirm." Thus the constituent assembly, embracing in its distrust of labour organisations the dangerous utopian theory of every man's "right to work," tumbled finally into the pitfall of

"state socialism.”

Napoleon, in his law of 1803, prohibited labour coalitions held with a view to arranging strikes. In article 414 and following of his Penal Code he makes a greater show of justice by accompanying his prohibition of labour coalitions with similar restrictions upon manufacturers; but this can be nothing but a feint, since manufacturers have no need to assemble noisily for the purpose of deciding their affairs. In article 1781 of his Civil Code Napoleon manifests great partiality for the employer, whose word is not to be questioned in matters pertaining to the amount of wages paid, the salary list of the previous year or the estimates for the current year. In 1805 the employé was obliged to provide himself with a livret (small book or certificate), that was to be left in the hands of the employer, who was thus given complete control over the employé.

Nevertheless the working classes should be grateful to Napoleon for having given them the first law establishing trade councils (Conseils de Prud'homme), and also for prompt and inexpensive jurisdiction (law of the 18th of March, 1806). This law was later modified in a sense even more favourable to the workingman.

Social Metamorphosis

The social transformation that took place in France during the period of the Revolution can be followed in all its phases. Before 1789 there had existed "privileged classes," that refused to bear any share of the public burden on the pretext that the clergy aided the state by its prayers, and the nobility by its sword. Now privileges and privileged classes have both disappeared. The clergy has ceased to form a distinct order, the first of the state; the decree of the 12th of August, 1789, has deprived it of its revenues, the tithes; that of the 2nd of November has robbed it of its lands; the congregations, that second and richer half of the ecclesiastical body, have been dissolved. The secular clergy has been made a mere collection of salaried officials, having no corporate place in the nation.

Civil acts are taken out of the hands of the clergy and placed in those of municipal officers, and religious marriage is subordinated to civil marriage.

Protestants have been emancipated, also Jews; everywhere freedom of conscience has been proclaimed, a privilege that the clergy will soon have to claim in its own behalf, as its civil constitution, in the effort to make it independent of the spiritual authority of Rome, has placed it in a position where it will have to choose between persecution and schism. The enactments that follow fall so heavily upon "refractory" priests or those who are not "sworn in" as to deliver them over to the massacres of September, 1792, to death by drowning in the Loire at the hands of the ferocious Carrier, to the tumbrils of the guillotine and the bloody-thirsty humours of the populace.

The night of the 4th of August also dealt the death blow to the nobility as second order of the state. It has been seen what became of seignorial revenues and, after the emigration, of the great landed estates. The aristocracy has been shorn of its honours in the village church, has been stripped of those rights which it valued highest. It is no longer necessary to belong to the nobility in order to attain to the exercise of the highest state functions, or to fill the positions of greatest dignity in the church, the magistracy, and the army; on the contrary such an accident of birth is a decided disadvantage. There is no longer a court where the noble, ruined by the Revolution, can seek consolation in honorary privileges, or can solicit the " 'special favour" of the king; there remains no place open to him in the entire country. Moreover, not only does the nobility not exist, but the law declaring that children shall inherit equally and limiting the right of making wills renders the exercise of the right of primogeniture, and the consequent reconstruction of the old domains, an impossibility for the future.

The terror caused by the Revolution is everywhere increased by local anarchy; there is violence above and violence below. Who can doubt that the morrow has arrived of the humanitarian prophecies of a Voltaire, a Rousseau, an Abbé de Saint Pierre; of the sentimentalities of a Beaumarchais and of the virile philanthropy of a Turgot? The drama has followed upon the idyl. "The Revolution, prepared by the most civilised classes of the nation," says De Tocqueville, "passed for execution into the hands of the roughest and least cultured."

THERE is no scene, no portion of history, that can be regarded under so many different views as the revolution upon which we now enter. To some, it is all crime; to others, all glory. In England, the prevailing sentiment has been, to regard the French nation, as if it were an individual actuated by one perverse will, and flinging itself, from pure love of mischief, into the agonies of suffering and the depths of crime.

But revolution is one of the maladies of kingdoms, or rather the crisis of malady. It may proceed from some latent vice in the constitution, from dissipation, from mismanagement. To avert such is often no more in the power of the nation or of the individual than it is to be all-sound and all-wise. From early times there was something wrong in the framework of French society. These defects have been noted; above all, that marked division of classes which refused amalgamation. Their mutual and oft-renewed struggles have been seen. The people, the great mass, not of the poor and ignorant, but often of the wealthy and enlightened, were conquered and borne down in the combat. Their defeat they could have forgiven; but the extravagant use which the upper classes had made of their victory revolted the fallen. The clergy grasped one-third of the lands of the kingdom, the noblesse another; yet the remaining third was burdened with all the expense of government. This was reversing the social pyramid, and placing it upon its apex.

To reform this state of things was necessary. Flesh and blood could not bear it. Intellect, more powerful still, rebelled against it. Owing to the great exertions for the latter in print and orally, all men were agreed as to the necessity of this change. Louis XVI, however uneducated, felt and owned the need; but he was at first young, weak because ignorant, and dared not to break through the trammels of a court. The monarch, nevertheless,