the wisp of freedom, are the sail-makers, the spinners, the ship-owners and the slave-traders.  The slave-traders!  The men who live and grow rich by a traffic in human flesh and blood in the colonies, are conducting at home a campaign in the sacred name of liberty!  Don’t you see that the whole movement is a movement of hucksters and traders and peddling vassals swollen by wealth into envy of the power that lies in birth alone?  The money-changers in Paris who hold the bonds in the national debt, seeing the parlous financial condition of the State, tremble at the thought that it may lie in the power of a single man to cancel the debt by bankruptcy.  To secure themselves they are burrowing underground to overthrow a state and build upon its ruins a new one in which they shall be the masters.  And to accomplish this they inflame the people.  Already in Dauphiny we have seen blood run like water — the blood of the populace, always the blood of the populace.  Now in Brittany we may see the like.  And if in the end the new ideas prevail? if the seigneurial rule is overthrown, what then?  You will have exchanged an aristocracy for a plutocracy.  Is that worth while?  Do you ’think that under money-changers and slave-traders and men who have waxed rich in other ways by the ignoble arts of buying and selling, the lot of the people will be any better than under their priests and nobles?  Has it ever occurred to you, Philippe, what it is that makes the rule of the nobles so intolerable?  Acquisitiveness.  Acquisitiveness is the curse of mankind.  And shall you expect less acquisitiveness in men who have built themselves up by acquisitiveness?  Oh, I am ready to admit that the present government is execrable, unjust, tyrannical — what you will; but I beg you to look ahead, and to see that the government for which it is aimed at exchanging it may be infinitely worse.”

Philippe sat thoughtful a moment.  Then he returned to the attack.

“You do not speak of the abuses, the horrible, intolerable abuses of power under which we labour at present.”

“Where there is power there will always be the abuse of it.”

“Not if the tenure of power is dependent upon its equitable administration.”

“The tenure of power is power.  We cannot dictate to those who hold it.”

“The people can — the people in its might.”

“Again I ask you, when you say the people do you mean the populace?  You do.  What power can the populace wield?  It can run wild.  It can burn and slay for a time.  But enduring power it cannot wield, because power demands qualities which the populace does not possess, or it would not be populace.  The inevitable, tragic corollary of civilization is populace.  For the rest, abuses can be corrected by equity; and equity, if it is not found in the enlightened, is not to be found at all.  M. Necker is to set about correcting abuses, and limiting privileges.  That is decided.  To that end the States General are to assemble.”