content. High and low only asked to be let live. The poor asked
it--slaughtered on a hundred battle-fields, burnt out of house and home:
vast tracts of the centre of Europe were lying desert; the population was
diminished for several generations. The trading classes, ruined by the
long war, only asked to be let live, and make a little money. The
nobility, too, only asked to be let live. They had lost, in the long
struggle, not only often lands and power, but their ablest and bravest
men; and a weaker and meaner generation was left behind, to do the
governing of the world. Let them live, and keep what they had. If signs
of vigour still appeared in France, in the wars of Louis XIV. they were
feverish, factitious, temporary--soon, as the event proved, to droop into
the general exhaustion. If wars were still to be waged they were to be
wars of succession, wars of diplomacy; not wars of principle, waged for
the mightiest invisible interests of man. The exhaustion was general;
and to it we must attribute alike the changes and the conservatism of the
Ancien Regime. To it is owing that growth of a centralising despotism,
and of arbitrary regal power, which M. de Tocqueville has set forth in a
book which I shall have occasion often to quote. To it is owing, too,
that longing, which seems to us childish, after ancient forms,
etiquettes, dignities, court costumes, formalities diplomatic, legal,
ecclesiastical. Men clung to them as to keepsakes of the past--revered
relics of more intelligible and better-ordered times. If the spirit had
been beaten out of them in a century of battle, that was all the more
reason for keeping up the letter. They had had a meaning once, a life
once; perhaps there was a little life left in them still; perhaps the dry
bones would clothe themselves with flesh once more, and stand upon their
feet. At least it was useful that the common people should so believe.
There was good hope that the simple masses, seeing the old dignities and
formalities still parading the streets, should suppose that they still
contained men, and were not mere wooden figures, dressed artistically in