But chief among the speakers was the President of the Third Estate, Robert Miron, Provost of the Merchants of Paris.  His speech, though spoken across the great abyss of time and space and thought and custom which separates him from us, warms a true man’s heart even now.  With touching fidelity he pictured the sad life of the lower orders,—­their thankless toil, their constant misery; then, with a sturdiness which awes us, he arraigned, first, royalty for its crushing taxation,—­next, the whole upper class for its oppressions,—­and then, daring death, he thus launched into popular thought an idea:—­

“It is nothing less than a miracle that the people are able to answer so many demands.  On the labor of their hands depends the maintenance of Your Majesty, of the clergy, of the nobility, of the commons.  What without their exertions would be the value of the tithes and great possessions of the Church, of the splendid estates of the nobility, or of our own house-rents and inheritances?  With their bones scarcely skinned over, your wretched people present themselves before you, beaten down and helpless, with the aspect rather of death itself than of living men, imploring your succor in the name of Him who has appointed you to reign over them,—­who made you a man, that you might be merciful to other men,—­and who made you the father of your subjects, that you might be compassionate to these your helpless children.  If Your Majesty shall not take means for that end, I fear lest despair should teach the sufferers that a soldier is, after all, nothing more than a peasant bearing arms; and lest, when the vine-dresser shall have taken up his arquebuse, he should cease to become an anvil only that he may become a hammer."

After this the Third Estate demanded the convocation of a general assembly every ten years, a more just distribution of taxes, equality of all before the law, the suppression of interior custom-houses, the abolition of sundry sinecures held by nobles, the forbidding to leading nobles of unauthorized levies of soldiery, some stipulations regarding the working clergy and the non-residence of bishops; and in the midst of all these demands, as a golden grain amid husks, they placed a demand for the emancipation of the serfs.

But these demands were sneered at.  The idea of the natural equality in rights of all men,—­the idea of the personal worth of every man,—­the idea that rough-clad workers have prerogatives which can be whipped out by no smooth-clad idlers,—­these ideas were as far beyond serf-owners of those days as they are beyond slave-owners of these days.  Nothing was done.  Augustin Thierry is authority for the statement that the clergy were willing to yield something.  The nobles would yield nothing.  The different orders quarrelled until one March morning in 1615, when, on going to their hall, they were barred out and told that the workmen were fitting the place for a Court ball.  And so the deputies separated,—­to all appearance no new work done, no new ideas enforced, no strong men set loose.