tance from the rash and indigested opinions which had been diffused among her people. They were each in extremes. There was no point of union between what existed and what was thought desirable. Those who had the controul of the popular mind had not the wisdom or virtue to engraft a substantial freedom upon the old stock of their monarchical institutions;they were intent only to pull down all the establishments of the State and of the Church, in the hope to climb to some bad eminence" upon their ruins. Can it be wondered that the end of this was universal destruction?

The political circumstances of France, from 1780 to 1790, were remarkably calculated to produce some great convulsion in the government. The French cabinet, with a singular blindness and improvidence, engaged in a war for the maintenance of republican principles. When the ancient hatred of England, or the ambition of a military people, prompted Louis XVI. to send a large army to assist the Americans in their contest with this country, his ministry must have been wofully ignorant of the human mind, to have imagined that this body of men would have engaged in a cause, in which all the common declamation about liberty would be rung in their ears, and return home without bringing with them any principles that might militate against the security of their own despotism. Such was the effect of France engaging in the war of the American Colonies. When the cry of liberty was first raised at home, the French soldiery recollected that they had been successfully fighting in the cause of a republic, in which neither titles, hereditary power, or an established priesthood, were regarded. They threw off all their old habits of allegiance to the monarchy under which they served;they became the most inveterate and the most powerful enemies of him they were sworn to defend ;-they deserted the unhappy Monarch at his need, and surrendered themselves to the command of the furious demagogues by whom he was sacrificed.

The finances of France, after the period of the

American war, became greatly embarrassed. The taxes, as we have said before, were not equally levied upon the people, so that no material addition could be made to the accustomed imposts. Various expedients, some of a weak and some of a disgraceful nature, were successively tried; and each new experiment added some new cause of reproach to the government, and placed some new power in the hands of the discontented. The imposition of taxes produced frequent contests between the crown and the parliament; -and these contests were rendered more serious by tumultuous assemblies of the people, sometimes ending in fatal riots, which appeared the certain prelude of the most sanguinary events. At length, by the advice of M. Necker, the King assembled the States-General, an ancient body somewhat resembling our House of Commons. From this period we may date the actual commencement of the French Revolution; and our narrative will therefore proceed from this point, in as distinct and circumstantial a manner as our limits will allow.

The States-General were assembled on the fifth of May, 1789. The King addressed to them a speech from the throne, in which he expressed his confidence that the unanimity of that assembly would assist his own exertions to establish the happiness of the kingdom. He was fatally disappointed. The original condition upon which the States-General were convoked, was, that the C mmons, or third estate, should equal the number of the Nobility and Clergy united. These two estates felt jealous at the preponderance thus given to the democratic interest; - and they determined to vote in separate chambers, as distinct bodies. This the Commons resisted. For more than a month each body continued to contest this i tant point, without either attempting to consider the general difficulties of the nation. At length the Abbé Sieyes, a man who afterwards became most conspicuous in the Revolution, proposed that the Commons should at once assume the title of the National Assembly. The proposition was agreed to;-and from

! por

that time this body, which was influenced by some of the most dangerous, ambitious, and profligate men that ever led on a people to their destruction, assumed in reality the reins of government, and never rested till they had brought their King and his family to the scaffold, and plunged their country into crimes and miseries almost unexampled in the history of the human race.

On the 23d of June the King met the three estates, with the hope of reconciling their divisions. He pressed upon their consideration the necessity of maintaining the three distinctions of Nobles, Clergy, and Commons, though he agreed to the abolition of the pecuniary privileges of the two first classes, and suggested some reforms which were essential to the general happiness of the people. The Commons resisted all these attempts at conciliation;-they felt their own influence, and they were determined upon changing the ancient constitution of France. They at length triumphed; and on the 27th of July the Nobles and Clergy consented to form a part of the National Assembly, resigning the right of voting in

distinct chambers.

At this season France was afflicted with a great and general scarcity. The want and the dearness of provisions has furnished, in all countries, occasion for violence and riot;-the unhappy people of France were taught to believe that their privations were owing to the crimes of the government, and they readily united the cry of liberty with the demand for bread. M. Necker, the popular minister of that day, who had advised the assembling of the States General, was dismissed from office on the 11th of July. If he was honest to his King, he at least sacrificed his cause by timid and time-serving counsels. His dismissal was the signal for the greatest outrages on the part of the populace. Houses were pillaged, mansions were burnt, and a national cockade was assumed by the people, as a badge of union. The King at length consented that the citizens of Paris should form themselves into military bodies;-and

these irregular troops, called together for the preservation of tranquillity, were mainly instrumental in overturning the monarchy, and in plunging their country into anarchy and bloodshed.

The first great operation of the organized mob was to attack the Hotel of Invalids. They here procured 30,000 stand of arms. Thus formidable, they attempted enterprises at which regular troops might have been appalled. They attacked the Bastile, a fortress devoted to the confinement of state prisoners. The walls of this dreary place had, indeed, beheld many miserable and many innocent persons immured, without a trial or a show of justice The destruction of the system of imprisonment, at the absolute will of an individual, was a triumph for humanity. But it was a triumph that might have been effected without the sanguinary ferocity which distinguished the day of its fall. The governor and other officers of the prison, some of them men of the greatest honour and humanity, were victims to the blind and remorseless fury of the mob. Some were beheaded at the place of public execution, others were torn in pieces with circumstances of the most horrible cruelty, and the mangled remains of these victims were paraded through the streets, with demonstrations of ferocity, which at once indicated the disposition of the people to perpetrate those crimes, which so quickly followed this first remarkable exercise of their guilty power.

At this crisis the government was deserted by the army. The troops were corrupted by evil examples, and discontented from the want of pay, and other neglects. They declared they would not arm against their fellow-citizens.

The National Assembly used no exertions to restrain the tumults which threatened the kingdom, not only in the capital, but in many of the provinces. They demanded the restoration of M. Necker. The unfortunate Louis, without finances, with a mutinous army, a revolted capital, and a discontented country, was eager to embrace any proposition that furnished a hope of tranquillity. He recalled M. Necker. But

the triumph of this minister was of short duration. He was too honest to connect himself with those men who evidently aimed at the subversion of the monarchy, and he soon voluntarily retired to Switzerland, satisfied that no ordinary measures would save France from self-destruction.

In the meantime, however disposed the King showed himself to consent to the demands of the people, every new concession produced some new indignity. The officers of his government were savagely butchered. Mons. de Foulon, and his son-in-law, Mons. Berthier, each perished in consequence of the suspicions of a flushed and brutal mob;-and the leaders of the people, La Fayette and Bailly, found how much easier it was to impel, than to restrain, the popular fury. These outrages were not confined to the capital. The peasantry, in many places, burnt the castles of the nobility, and murdered the inhabitants;-in many large towns the rich were plundered and the public functionaries butchered.

The National Assembly, instead of lending their aid to the executive power to repress these excesses, were occupied in discussing a declaration of "the Rights of Man." Some reasonable members indeed contended that, if the people secured just laws and prudent regulations, it was not necessary to waste their time in abstract disquisitions, as difficult as they were mischievous. But the principles of a quibbling and arrogant philosophy had been too deeply sown amongst the nation, to make them willingly surrender this favourite object. They agreed to begin anew in every point of their future polity;-they took no "stand upon the ancient way;"-they reasoned and they acted as if France had suddenly emerged from barbarism, and had never enjoyed even the semblance of civil government. It cannot be matter of wonder that in this rage to pull down their social edifice they should have failed to erect in its stead any other than a tottering monument of human frailty-a slaughterhouse for anarchy, rather than a temple for freedom. The National Assembly was at length awakened