the security and the happiness of empires. Turgot
indeed had failed in office; but his reputation was not
diminished, and the power of his name exceeded all
others at the outbreak of the Revolution. His policy of
employing the Crown to reform the State was at once
rejected in favour of other counsels; but his influence
may be traced in many acts of the Assembly, and on two
very memorable occasions it was not auspicious. It was
a central dogma of the party that land is the true source
of wealth, or, as Asgill said, that man deals in nothing
but earth. When a great part of France became national
property, men were the more easily persuaded that land
can serve as the basis of public credit and of unlimited
assignats. According to a weighty opinion which we
shall have to consider before long, the parting of the
ways in the Revolution was on the day when, rejecting
the example both of England and America, the French
resolved to institute a single undivided legislature. It
was the Pennsylvanian model; and Voltaire had pronounced Pennsylvania the best government in the world.
Franklin gave the sanction of an oracle to the constitution of his state, and Turgot was its vehement protagonist in Europe.
A king ruling over a level democracy, and a democracy ruling itself through the agency of a king, were long contending notions in the first Assembly. One was monarchy according to Turgot, the other was monarchy adapted to Rousseau; and the latter, for a time, prevailed. Rousseau was the citizen of a small republic, consisting of a single town, and he professed to have applied its example to the government of the world. It was Geneva, not as he saw it, but as he extracted its essential principle, and as it has since become, Geneva illustrated by the Forest Cantons and the Landesgemeinde more than by its own charters. The idea was that the grown men met in the market-place, like the peasants of Glarus under their trees, to manage their affairs, making and unmaking officials, conferring and revoking powers. They were equal, because every man had exactly the
