The distance between the altar and the throne is a short one, and yet it requires thirty years for opinion to overcome it.  No political or social attacks are yet made during the first half of the century.  The irony of the “Lettres Persanes"is as cautious as it is delicate, and the " Esprit des Lois” is conservative.  As to the Abbé de Saint-Pierre his reveries provoke a smile, and when he undertakes to censure Louis XIV the Academy strikes him off its list.  At last, the economists on one side and the parliamentarians on the other, give the signal. — Voltaire says[34] that “about 1750 the nation, satiated with verse, tragedies, comedies, novels, operas, romantic histories, and still more romantic moralizings, and with disputes about grace and convulsions, began to discuss the question of corn.”  What makes bread dear?  Why is the laborer so miserable?  What constitutes the material and limits of taxation?  Ought not all land to pay taxes, and should one piece pay more than its net product?  These are the questions that find their way into drawing-rooms under the king’s auspices, by means of Quesnay, his physician, “his thinker,” the founder of a system which aggrandizes the sovereign to relieve the people, and which multiplies the number of tax-payers to lighten the burden of taxation. — At the same time, through the opposite door, other questions enter, not less novel.  “Is France[35] a mild and representative monarchy or a government of the Turkish stamp?  Are we subject to the will of an absolute master, or are we governed by a limited and regulated power? . . .  The exiled parliaments are studying public rights at their sources and conferring together on these as in the academies.  Through their researches, the opinion is gaining ground in the public mind that the nation is above the king, as the universal church is above the pope.” — The change is striking and almost immediate.  “Fifty years ago,” says d’Argenson, again, “the public showed no curiosity concerning matters of the State.  Today everybody reads his Gazette de Paris, even in the provinces.  People reason at random on political subjects, but nevertheless they occupy themselves with them.” — Conversation having once provided itself with this diet holds fast to it, the drawing-rooms, accordingly, opening their doors to political philosophy, and, consequently, to the Social Contract, to the Encyclopedia, to the preachings of Rousseau, Mably, d’Holbach, Raynal, and Diderot.  In 1759, d’Argenson, who becomes excited, already thinks the last hour has come.  “We feel the breath of a philosophical anti-monarchical, free government wind; the idea is current, and possibly this form of government, already in some minds, is to be carried out the first favorable opportunity.  Perhaps the revolution might take place with less opposition than one supposes, occurring by acclamation.[36]