Great pity has naturally been expressed for the nobility (or gentry) and clergy of France; but, properly considered, France had at that time neither a nobility nor a clergy. A nobility with no status independent of the king--with no connection with its estates beyond the reception of their rents--with no weight in the legislature; with ridiculously exaggerated rank, and ridiculously contracted influence; with no interest in local expenditure or voice in public management; a gentry, in short, debarred from active life, except as officers of the army--shut out by monarchic jealousy from interference in affairs, and by the pride of birth from the pursuits of commerce--is not a gentry at all. A clergy, in the same way, is a priesthood only in right of its belief in the doctrines it professes to hold, and the attention it bestows on its parishioners. Except in some few instances, the Christianity both of faith and practice had disappeared from France. It was time, therefore, that nobility and clergy should also disappear. The excesses of the Revolution which broke out in 1789, and reached their climax in the murder of the king in 1793, showed the excesses of the misgovernment of former years. If there had been one redeeming feature of the ancient system, it would have produced its fruits in the milder treatment of the victims of the reaction. In one or two provinces, indeed, we are told that hereditary attachment still bound the people to their superiors, and in those provinces, the philosophic chronicler of the fact informs us, the centralizing system had not completed its authority. The gentry still performed some of the duties of their station, and the priests, of their profession. Everywhere else blind hatred, unreasoning hope, and bloody revenge. The century, which began with the vainglorious egotism of Louis the Fourteenth and the war of the Spanish Succession,--which progressed through the British masterdom of India and the self-sustaining republicanism of America,--died out in the convulsive strugglings of thirty-one millions of souls on the soil of France to breathe a purer political air and shake off the trammels which had gradually been riveted upon them for three hundred years. Great Britain had preceded them by a century, and has ever since shown the bloodless and legal origin of her freedom by the bloodless and legal use she has made of it. We emerged from the darkness of 1688 with all the great landmarks of our country not only erect, but strengthened. We had king, lords, and commons, and a respect for law, and veneration for precedents, which led the great Duke of Wellington to say, in answer to some question about the chance of a British revolution, that "no man could foresee whether such a thing might occur or not, but, when it did, he was sure it would be done by Act of Parliament."