is certain that the three orders had combined for mutual protection against an alliance of any two of them.  Besides, the States of 1576 saw how the clergy readopted to their profit, against the two laic orders, the proposition voted in 1355.  It is beyond a doubt that this doctrine served to keep the majority from oppressing the minority whatever may have been its name.  Only, in point of fact, it was most frequently the third estate that must have profited by the regulation.

“In brief, we may, before the fifteenth century, make suppositions, but they are no more than mere conjectures.  It was at the great States of Tours, in 1468, that, for the first time, the third order bore the name which has been given to it by history.”

The fact was far before its name.  Had the third estate been centred entirely in the communes at strife with their lords, had the fate of burgherdom in France depended on the communal liberties won in that strife, we should see, at the end of the thirteenth century, that element of French society in a state of feebleness and decay.  But it was far otherwise.  The third estate drew its origin and nourishment from all sorts of sources; and whilst one was within an ace of drying up, the others remained abundant and fruitful.  Independently of the commune properly so called and invested with the right of self-government, many towns had privileges, serviceable though limited franchises, and under the administration of the king’s officers they grew in population and wealth.  These towns did not share, towards the end of the thirteenth century, in the decay of the once warlike and victorious communes.  Local political liberty was to seek in them; the spirit of independence and resistance did not prevail in them; but we see growing up in them another spirit which has played a grand part in French history, a spirit of little or no ambition, of little or no enterprise, timid even and scarcely dreaming of actual resistance, but honorable, inclined to order, persevering, attached to its traditional franchises, and quite able to make them respected, sooner or later.  It was especially in the towns administered in the king’s name and by his provosts that there was a development of this spirit, which has long been the predominant characteristic of French burgherdom.  It must not be supposed that, in the absence of real communal independence, these towns lacked all internal security.  The kingship was ever fearful lest its local officers should render themselves independent, and remembered what had become in the ninth century of the crown’s offices, the duchies and the countships, and of the difficulty it had at that time to recover the scattered remnants of the old imperial authority.  And so the Capetian kings with any intelligence, such as Louis VI., Philip Augustus, St. Louis, and Philip the Handsome, were careful to keep a hand over their provosts, sergeants, and officers of all kinds, in order that their power should not grow so great as