sustained the movement only to serve interests that were foreign to
the religious cause. To these two classes were added adventurers,
ruined noblemen, younger sons, to whom all troubles were equally
acceptable. But among the artisan and merchant classes the new faith
was sincere and based on calculation. The masses of the poorer people
adhered at once to a religion which gave the ecclesiastical property
to the State, and deprived the dignitaries of the Church of their
enormous revenues. Commerce everywhere reckoned up the profits of this
religious operation, and devoted itself body, soul, and purse, to the
cause.

But among the young men of the French bourgeoisie the Protestant
movement found that noble inclination to sacrifices of all kinds which
inspires youth, to which selfishness is, as yet, unknown. Eminent men,
sagacious minds, discerned the Republic in the Reformation; they
desired to establish throughout Europe the government of the United
Provinces, which ended by triumphing over the greatest Power of those
times,--Spain, under Philip the Second, represented in the Low
Countries by the Duke of Alba. Jean Hotoman was then meditating his
famous book, in which this project is put forth,--a book which spread
throughout France the leaven of these ideas, which were stirred up
anew by the Ligue, repressed by Richelieu, then by Louis XIV., always
protected by the younger branches, by the house of Orleans in 1789, as
by the house of Bourbon in 1589. Whoso says "Investigate" says
"Revolt." All revolt is either the cloak that hides a prince, or the
swaddling-clothes of a new mastery. The house of Bourbon, the younger
sons of the Valois, were at work beneath the surface of the
Reformation.

At the moment when the little boat floated beneath the arch of the