than honor among coming generations. He was liberal, and willing that the public good should prevail, but not at the risk of his ascendency with the king. A jealousy of superior talents was his only ever wakeful passion. To foreign ambassadors he paid the attentions claimed by their station; but the professions which he lavished with graceful levity had such an air of nothingness that no one ever confided in them enough to gain the right of charging him seriously with duplicity. To men of every condition he never forgot to show due regard, disguising his unfailing deference to rank by freedom of remark and gayety. His administration was sure to be weak, for it was his maxim never to hold out against any one who had power enough to be formidable, and he wished to please alike the courtiers and public opinion, the nobility and the philosophers, those who stickled for the king's absolute sway and those who clamored for the restoration of parliaments, those who wished a cordial understanding with England and those who favored her insurgent colonies. Louis XVI. was looking for an experienced and firm guide to correct his own indecision; and he fell upon a well-mannered, complacent old gentleman, who had the same fault with himself.

Declining a department, Maurepas, as the head of the cabinet, selected his own associates, choosing men by whom he feared neither to be superseded nor eclipsed. To the Count de Vergennes was assigned the department of foreign affairs. The veteran statesman, then fifty-seven years old, was of plebeian origin, and married to a plebeian; unsupported by the high nobility, and without claims on Austria or Marie Antoinette. His father had been president of the parliament at Dijon. His own diplomatic career began in 1740, and had been marked by moderation, vigilance, and success. He had the courage of Choiseul, equal acquaintance with courts, equal sensitiveness to the dignity of France, and greater self-control. Indefatigably laborious, he conducted affairs with method, rectitude, and clearness. His character was firm, his mode of thinking liberal, and he loved to surround himself with able men. His conversation was marked by caution; his manner, grave and coldly polite. As he served a weak king, he was always on his guard, and to give a categorical answer was his

aversion. Like nearly every Frenchman of that day, he was thoroughly a monarchist; and he gained at once, and ever retained the good opinion of Louis XVI. Eleven years before, he had predicted that the conquest of Canada would hasten the independence of British America, and he was now from vantage-ground to watch his prophecy come true.

The philosophers of the day, like the king, wished the happiness of the people, and public opinion required that they should be represented in the cabinet. Maurepas complied. Malesherbes received the department of Paris and the police of the kingdom. The ministry of the marine was conferred on Turgot, whose name was as yet little known at Paris, and whose artlessness made him even a less dangerous rival than Vergennes. Coming forward in the purity of studious philosophy to take part in active life, he was well-informed, amiable, and of a taste the most delicate and sure; austere, yet holding it to be every man's business to solace those who suffer; wishing the accomplishment of good, not his own glory in doing it. For him the human race was one great family under a common Father; always, through calm and through "agitations," through good and through ill, through sorrow and through joy, on the march, though at "a slow step," toward a greater perfection. In five weeks he so won upon his sovereign's good-will that he was transferred to the ministry of finance. This was the wish of all the philosophers: of Alembert, Condorcet, Bailly, La Harpe, Marmontel, Thomas, Condillac, Morellet, and Voltaire. Nor of them alone. "Turgot," said Malesherbes, "has the heart of L'Hôpital and the head of Bacon." His candor, moreover, gave him clearsightedness and distinctness of purpose; his hopefulness promised to bear him serenely through the bitter warfare with selfish passions. At a moment when everybody confessed that reform was essential, it seemed a national benediction that a youthful king should intrust the task of amendment to a statesman who in a libertine age joined unquestioned probity to comprehensive intelligence and administrative experience. At his accession, the cry of joy broke from Voltaire: "A new world is about to bloom."

In France, the peasants were poor and ignorant, but, like all

Frenchmen, were free, and in the happiest provinces had been so for half a thousand years. In many parts of the kingdom they had retained their rights of property in the acres which they tilled. The defence of the country had passed from the king and his peers with their vassals to the king and his standing army. With the decay of the feudal system the nobles sought service in his pay; their vassals became a people.

The nobility, claiming for themselves exemptions from taxation which of old belonged to them in return for their defence of the kingdom, gave up none of their claims on the peasants who were crushed under a complicated system of irredeemable dues to roads and canals; to the bakehouse and the brewery of the lord of the manor; to his wine-press and his mill; to his tolls at the river, the market, or the fair; to ground-rents and quit-rents and fines on alienation. But there existed no harmonizing of the contrasts between privilege and poverty. The poor, though gay by temperament, lived sad and apart; bereft of intercourse with superior culture; never mirthful but in mockery of misery; not cared for in their want, nor solaced in hospitals, nor visited in prisons. The annual public expenditures largely exceeding the revenue, the nobility suffered the monarch to impose taxes on the unprivileged classes at his will. The imposts, which in two centuries had increased tenfold, fell almost exclusively on the lowly, who toiled and suffered; having no redress against those employed by the government; regarding the monarch with touching reverence and love, though they knew him mostly as the power that harried them; ruled as though joy were no fit companion for labor; as though want were the necessary goad to industry, and sorrow the only guarantee of quiet. They were the strength of the kingdom, the untiring producers of its wealth, the source of supply of its armies, the chief contributors to the royal revenue, and yet so forlorn was their condi tion that they cherished scarcely a dim vision of a happier futurity on earth.

Out of this sad state Turgot undertook to lift his country by peace, order, and economy. "It is to you personally," said he to Louis XVI., " to the man, honest, just, and good, rather than to the king, that I give myself up. You have confided

to me the happiness of your people, and the care of making you and your authority beloved; but I shall have to combat those who gain by abuses, the prejudices against all reform, the majority of the court, and every solicitor of favors. I shall sacrifice myself for the people; but I may incur even their hatred by the very measures I shall take to prevent their distress.' "Have no fear," said the king, pressing the hand of his new comptroller-general; "I shall always support you."

The policy of Turgot implied a continuance of peace; yet the distrust of England, as an ever vigilant and unscrupulous rival which in 1755 had begun hostilities without notice and at the end of the war had stripped France of its best acquisitions in America and Hindostan, could not be hushed. French statesmen, therefore, bent the ear to catch the earliest surgings of American discontent; and they observed of the instructions from the convention of Virginia to its delegates in the continental congress: "They are the first which propose to restrain the act of navigation itself, and give pledges to resist force by force."

On Saturday, the sixth of August, Gage received an official copy of the act of parliament "for the better regulating the province of the Massachusetts Bay." It was, on the side of Great Britain, aggressive and revolutionary; it had been strenuously resisted and was utterly condemned by the Whig party of England. That the memory of their resistance might not perish, Rockingham and his friends had placed on the records of the house of lords their protest against the act. They condemned it "because," said they, "a definitive legal offence, by which a forfeiture of the charter is incurred, has not been clearly stated and fully proved; neither has notice of this adverse proceeding been given to the parties affected; neither have they been heard in their own defence; and because the governor and council are intrusted with powers with which the British constitution has not trusted his majesty and privy council, so that the lives and properties of the subjects are put into their hands without control."

The principle of the statute was the concentration of all executive power, including the courts of justice, in the hands of the royal governor. Without previous notice to Massachu

setts and without a hearing, it took away rights and liberties which the people had enjoyed from the foundation of the colony, except in the evil days of James II., and which had been renewed in the charter from William and Mary. That charter was coeval with the great English revolution, had been the organic law of the people of Massachusetts for more than eighty years, and was associated in their minds with every idea of English liberty and every sentiment of loyalty to the English crown. Under its provisions, the councillors, twenty-eight in number, had been annually chosen by a convention of the council for the former year and the assembly, subject only to the negative of the governor; henceforward they were to be not less than twelve nor more than thirty-six, were to derive their appointments and their emoluments from the king and to be removable at his pleasure. The governor received authority, without consulting his council, to appoint and to remove all judges of the inferior courts, justices of the peace, and all officers belonging to the council and the courts of justice. The governor and council might change the sheriffs as often as they pleased. In case of a vacancy, the governor was to appoint the chief justice and judges of the superior court, who were to hold their commissions during the pleasure of the king, and depend on his good-will for the amount and the payment of their salaries. The right of selecting juries was taken from the inhabitants and freeholders of the towns, and conferred on the sheriffs of the several counties within the province. This regulating act, moreover, uprooted the dearest institution of New England, whose people, from the first settlement of the country, had been accustomed in their town-meetings to transact all business that touched them most nearly as fathers, as freemen, and as Christians. There they adopted local taxes to keep up their free schools; there they regulated the municipal concerns of the year; there they chose their representatives and instructed them; and, as the limits of the parish and the town were usually the same, there most of them took measures for the settlement of ministers of the gospel in their congregations; there they were accustomed to express their sentiments on any subject connected with their interests, rights, liberties, or religion. The regulating act, sweeping away the