before long, if not a disgust for it, at any rate a horror of it, and sought at any price a political regimen which would give them some security, the essential aim of the social estate.  When we arrive at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, we see a host of communes falling into decay or entirely disappearing; they cease really to belong to and govern themselves; some, like Laon, Cambrai, Beauvais, and Rheims, fought a long while against decline, and tried more than once to re-establish themselves in all their independence; but they could not do without the king’s support in their resistance to their lords, laic or ecclesiastical; and they were not in a condition to resist the kingship, which had grown whilst they were perishing.  Others, Meulan and Soissons, for example (in 1320 and 1335), perceived their weakness early, and themselves requested the kingship to deliver them from their communal organization, and itself assume their administration.  And so it is about this period, under St. Louis and Philip the Handsome, that there appear in the collections of acts of the French kingship, those great ordinances which regulate the administration of all communes within the kingly domains.  Hitherto the kings had ordinarily dealt with each town severally; and as the majority were almost independent, or invested with privileges of different kiwis and carefully respected, neither the king nor any great suzerain dreamed of prescribing general rules for communal regimen, nor of administering after a uniform fashion all the communes in their domains.  It was under St. Louis and Philip the Handsome that general regulations on this subject began.  The French communes were associations too small and too weak to suffice for self-maintenance and self-government amidst the disturbances of the great Christian community; and they were too numerous and too little enlightened to organize themselves into one vast confederation, capable of giving them a central government.  The communal liberties were not in a condition to found in France a great republican community; to the kingship appertained the power and fell the honor of presiding over the formation and the fortunes of the French nation.

But the kingship did not alone accomplish this great work.  At the very time that the communes were perishing and the kingship was growing, a new power, a new social element, the Third Estate, was springing up in France; and it was called to take a far more important place in the history of France, and to exercise far more influence upon the fate of the French father-land, than it had been granted to the communes to acquire during their short and incoherent existence.