that the excesses of the French Revolution are the necessary outcome of free thought in religion and of free action in politics. It is perfectly true that the determination to shake off a cruel and unjust yoke was implanted in the bosoms of the French people by the writings of those who are commonly called the Encyclopædists. These men were Freethinkers; some of them—as Holbach and Diderot—might fairly be called Atheists; some were nothing of the kind. These men taught the French people to think; they nurtured in their breasts a spirit of self-reliance; they roused a spirit of defiance. These men rang the tocsin which awoke France, and so far it is true that Freethought produced the Revolution, and so far Freethought may well be proud of her work. But not to Freethought, not to Liberty, must be ascribed the excesses which stained a revolution that was in its beginning, that might have been throughout, so purely glorious. For do you know what French Feudalism was? Do you know what those terrible rights were, which have branded so deeply into the French peasant's heart the hatred of the old nobility, that even to the present day he will hiss out between clenched teeth the word "aristocrat," with a passionate hatred which one hundred years of freedom have not quenched?
In the reign of Louis XIV. there was a Count, the Comte de Charolois, who used to shoot down, for his amusement, the peasants who had climbed into trees, and the tilers who were mending roofs. The chasse aux paysans, as it was pleasantly termed, the "hunt of peasants," was remembered by an old man who was in Paris during the Revolution as one of the amusements of the nobility in his youth. True, these acts were but the acts of a few; but they were done, and the people dared not strike back. Then there was another right, a right which outraged all humanity, and which gave to the lord the first claim to the serf's bride. The terrible story in Charles Dickens's "Tale of Two Cities" is no fiction, except in details, if we may judge from some of the chronicles of the time. (Dufaure gives many interesting details on French feudalism.) Then they might harness the serfs, like cattle, to their carts; they might keep them awake all night beating the trenches round their castles, lest noble slumbers should be disturbed by the croaking of the frogs. When any one throws in the Radical's teeth the excesses of the French Revolution, let the Radical answer him back with these rights, and ask if it is to be
