Not only is the fact new, but it has for France an entirely special interest, since—­to employ an expression much abused in the present day—­ it is a fact eminently French, essentially national.  Nowhere has burgherdom had so wide and so productive a career as that which fell to its lot in France.  There have been communes in the whole of Europe, in Italy, Spain, Germany, and England, as well as in France.  Not only have there been communes everywhere, but the communes of France are not those which, as communes, under that name and in the middle ages, have played the chiefest part and taken the highest place in history.  The Italian communes were the parents of glorious republics.  The German communes became free and sovereign towns, which had their own special history, and exercised a great deal of influence upon the general history of Germany.  The communes of England made alliance with a portion of the English feudal aristocracy, formed with it the preponderating house in the British government, and thus played, full early, a mighty part in the history of their country.  Far were the French communes, under that name and in their day of special activity, from rising to such political importance and to such historical rank.  And yet it is in France that the people of the communes, the burgherdom, reached the most complete and most powerful development, and ended by acquiring the most decided preponderance in the general social structure.  There have been communes, we say, throughout Europe; but there has not really been a victorious third estate anywhere, save in France.  The revolution of 1789, the greatest ever seen, was the culminating point arrived at by the third estate; and France is the only country in which a man of large mind could, in a burst of burgher’s pride, exclaim, “What is the third estate?  Everything.”

Since the explosion, and after all the changes, liberal and illiberal, due to the revolution of 1789, there has been a common-place, ceaselessly repeated, to the effect that there are no more classes in French society —­there is only a nation of thirty-seven millions of persons.  If it be meant that there are now no more privileges in France, no special laws and private rights for such and such families, proprietorships, and occupations, and that legislation is the same, and there is perfect freedom of movement for all, at all steps of the social ladder, it is true; oneness of laws and similarity of rights, is now the essential and characteristic fact of civil society in France, an immense, an excellent, and a novel fact in the history of human associations.  But beneath the dominance of this fact, in the midst of this national unity and this civil equality, there evidently and necessarily exist numerous and important diversities and inequalities, which oneness of laws and similarity of rights neither prevent nor destroy.  In point of property, real or personal, land or capital, there are rich and poor; there are the large, the middling,