[Sidenote:  Sovereigns—­their dispositions.]

But, indeed, kings are to guard against the same sort of dispositions in themselves.  They are very easily alienated from all the higher orders of their subjects, whether civil or military, laic or ecclesiastical.  It is with persons of condition that sovereigns chiefly come into contact.  It is from them that they generally experience opposition to their will.  It is with their pride and impracticability that princes are most hurt.  It is with their servility and baseness that they are most commonly disgusted.  It is from their humors and cabals that they find their affairs most frequently troubled and distracted.  But of the common people, in pure monarchical governments, kings know little or nothing; and therefore being unacquainted with their faults, (which are as many as those of the great, and much more decisive in their effects, when accompanied with power,) kings generally regard them with tenderness and favor, and turn their eyes towards that description of their subjects, particularly when hurt by opposition from the higher orders.  It was thus that the king of France (a perpetual example to all sovereigns) was ruined.  I have it from very sure information, (and it was, indeed, obvious enough, from the measures which were taken previous to the assembly of the States and afterwards,) that the king’s counsellors had filled him with a strong dislike to his nobility, his clergy, and the corps of his magistracy.  They represented to him, that he had tried them all severally, in several ways, and found them all untractable:  that he had twice called an assembly (the Notables) composed of the first men of the clergy, the nobility, and the magistrates; that he had himself named every one member in those assemblies, and that, though so picked out, he had not, in this their collective state, found them more disposed to a compliance with his will than they had been separately; that there remained for him, with the least prospect of advantage to his authority in the States-General, which were to be composed of the same sorts of men, but not chosen by him, only the Tiers Etat:  in this alone he could repose any hope of extricating himself from his difficulties, and of settling him in a clear and permanent authority.  They represented, (these are the words of one of my informants,) “that the royal authority, compressed with the weight of these aristocratic bodies, full of ambition and of faction, when once unloaded, would rise of itself, and occupy its natural place without disturbance or control”; that the common people would protect, cherish, and support, instead of crushing it.  “The people” (it was said) “could entertain no objects of ambition”; they were out of the road of intrigue and cabal, and could possibly have no other view than the support of the mild and parental authority by which they were invested, for the first time collectively, with real importance in the state, and protected in their peaceable and useful employments.