at home a campaign in the sacred name of liberty! Don't you see that
the whole movement is a movement of hucksters and traders and
peddling vassals swollen by wealth into envy of the power that lies
in birth alone? The money-changers in Paris who hold the bonds in
the national debt, seeing the parlous financial condition of the
State, tremble at the thought that it may lie in the power of a
single man to cancel the debt by bankruptcy. To secure themselves
they are burrowing underground to overthrow a state and build upon
its ruins a new one in which they shall be the masters. And to
accomplish this they inflame the people. Already in Dauphiny we
have seen blood run like water - the blood of the populace, always
the blood of the populace. Now in Brittany we may see the like.
And if in the end the new ideas prevail? if the seigneurial rule
is overthrown, what then? You will have exchanged an aristocracy
for a plutocracy. Is that worth while? Do you 'think that under
money-changers and slave-traders and men who have waxed rich in
other ways by the ignoble arts of buying and selling, the lot of
the people will be any better than under their priests and nobles?
Has it ever occurred to you, Philippe, what it is that makes the
rule of the nobles so intolerable? Acquisitiveness. Acquisitiveness
is the curse of mankind. And shall you expect less acquisitiveness
in men who have built themselves up by acquisitiveness? Oh, I am
ready to admit that the present government is execrable, unjust,
tyrannical - what you will; but I beg you to look ahead, and to see
that the government for which it is aimed at exchanging it may be
infinitely worse."

Philippe sat thoughtful a moment. Then he returned to the attack.

"You do not speak of the abuses, the horrible, intolerable abuses