In order to properly understand the French third estate and its importance, more is required than to look on at its birth; a glance must be taken at its grand destiny and the results at which it at last arrived.  Let us, therefore, anticipate centuries and get a glimpse, now at once, of that upon which the course of events from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century will shed full light.

Taking the history of France in its entirety and under all its phases, the third estate has been the most active and determining element in the process of Freneh civilization.  If we follow it in its relation with the general government of the country, we see it at first allied for six centuries to the kingship, struggling without cessation against the feudal aristocracy and giving predominance in place thereof to a single central power, pure monarchy, closely bordering, though with some frequently repeated but rather useless reservations, on absolute monarchy.  But, so soon as it had gained this victory and brought about this revolution, the third estate went in pursuit of a new one, attacking that single power to the foundation of which it had contributed so much and entering upon the task of changing pure monarchy into constitutional monarchy.  Under whatever aspect we regard it during these two great enterprises, so different one from the other, whether we study the progressive formation of French society or that of its government, the third estate is the most powerful and the most persistent of the forces which have influenced French civilization.

This fact is unique in the history of the world.  We recognize in the career of the chief nations of Asia and ancient Europe nearly all the great facts which have agitated France; we meet in them mixture of different races, conquest of people by people, immense inequality between classes, frequent changes in the forms of government and extent of public power; but nowhere is there any appearance of a class which, starting from the very lowest, from being feeble, despised, and almost imperceptible at its origin, rises by perpetual motion and by labor without respite, strengthens itself from period to period, acquires in succession whatever it lacked, wealth, enlightenment, influence, changes the face of society and the nature of government, and arrives at last at such a pitch of predominance that it may be said to be absolutely the country.  More than once in the world’s history the external semblances of such and such a society have been the same as those which have just been reviewed here, but it is mere semblance.  In India, for example, foreign invasions and the influx and establishment of different races upon the same soil have occurred over and over again; but with what result?  The permanence of caste has not been touched; and society has kept its divisions into distinct and almost changeless classes.  After India take China.  There too history exhibits conquests similar to the conquest of Europe by the