pended for a livelihood on the charity of their poor parishioners. Many of them, in consequence, were among the first who made common cause with the people in 1789—such as that apostolic figure of Claude Fauchet, who preached the revolution with the gospel in his hand.
With an irresponsible government, an effeminate aristocracy, a dissolute clergy, a poverty-stricken people, it seemed that the ruin of the old Régime must bring about that of the realm itself. But to save it from destruction there was yet left one sound and robust limb in the French body politic: the bourgeoisie or middle class; although there, did not then exist the infinite gradations by which social inequalities are to some degree hidden, or at least made less glaring, in the present day. For, as Arthur Young wrote, "there were no gentle transitions from ease to comfort, from comfort to wealth; you passed at once from beggary to profusion, from misery in mud cabins to Mademoiselle Hubert (a popular actress) in splendid spectacles." Still, from the ranks of the middle class there rose up a small phalanx of men—philosophers, historians, littérateurs, journalists: impassioned innovators, doughty pioneers, the light brigade of the Thought Militant of human progress. The very sound of the names of them—Voltaire, Diderot, d'Alembert, d'Holbach, Condillac, Helvétius—still rings upon our ears like so many battle-cries. These were no word-mongers calmly writing by their snug firesides, these were soldiers in the heat of the fight, eager, alert, fevered with action, whose words wave their swords, and who too often paid for their audacity with poverty, exile, and imprisonment. They have been much vilified, these brave philosophers, their system has been much misunder-
