self-restraint which is taught by responsibility in the exercise of office, indulged in ideal anticipations which were colored by an exasperating remembrance of griefs and wrongs. France was the eldest daughter of the Roman church, with a king who was a sincere though not a bigoted Roman Catholic; and its philosophers carried their impassioned war against the church to the utmost verge of skepticism and unbelief, while a suspicion that forms of religion were used as a mere instrument of government began to arise in the laboring classes of the cities. But, apart from all inferior influences, the power of generalization, in which the French nation excels all others, imparts from time to time an idealistic character to its policy. The Parisians felt the reverses of the Americans as if they had been their own; and, in November 1776, an approaching rupture with England was the subject of all conversations.

The American struggle was avowedly a war in defence of the common rights of mankind. The Prince de Montbarey, who owed his place as minister of war to the favor of Maurepas and female influence, and who cherished the prejudices of his order without being aware of his own mediocrity, professed to despise the people of the United States as formed from emigrants for the most part without character and without fortune, ambitious and fanatical, and likely to attract to their support "all the rogues and the worthless from the four parts of the globe." He had warned Lafayette against leaving his wife and wasting his fortune to play the part of Don Quixote in their behalf, and had raised in the council his feeble voice against the alliance of France with the insurgents. He regarded a victory over England as of no advantage commensurate with the dangerous example of sustaining a revolt against established authority. Besides, war would accumulate disorder in the public finances, retard useful works for the happiness of France, and justify reprisals by Great Britain on the colonies of the Bourbon princes.

It was against the interior sentiment of the king and the doubts of Maurepas, that the lingering influence of the policy of the balance of power, the mercantile aspirations of France, its spirit of philosophic freedom, and its traditional antago

nism to England as the monopolist of commerce and the ruler of the seas, forced the French alliance with America.

Just thirty-eight years before, Maurepas, in the vigor of manhood, had been famed for his aversion to England, and for the desire to found his glory on the restoration of the French navy. Of the members of the administration of Cardinal Fleury, he was thought to have had the mind of the widest range; and it was predicted of him that France would accomplish great results if he should ever become the director of its government. At length he was the first minister of a king who looked up to him with deference and implicit trust. The tone of his thoughts was unchanged; but he was so enfeebled by long exclusion from public affairs, and by years and infirmities, that no heroic enterprise could lure him from the love of quiet. By habit he put aside all business which admitted of delay. When the question of the alliance with America became urgent, he shrunk from proposing new taxes which the lately restored parliaments might refuse to register; and he gladly accepted the guarantee of Necker that all war expenditures could be met by the use of credit, financial operations, and reforms. It was only after the assurance of a sufficient supply of money from loans, that he no longer attempted to stem the opinion of Paris in favor of America.

The strength of the cabinet lay in Vergennes. He secured the unfailing good-will of his sovereign by recognising no authority of either clergy, or nobility, or third estate, but only of the monarch, whom all the three were to obey. Nor did he for a moment forget the respect due to Maurepas as his superior, so that he never excited a jealousy of rivalship. He had no prejudice about calling republics into being, whether in Europe or beyond the Atlantic, if the welfare of France seemed to require it; he continued to believe that from the family alliance Spain would follow France into the war with England; and in his eyes the interests of that branch of the house of Bourbon took precedence over those of the United States.

No head of an executive department was primarily a hearty friend to the new republic: Necker favored neutrality; and, though he was a Swiss by birth, his liberalism did not go beyond admiration of the British constitution of that day.

The statesmen of the nation had not yet deduced from experience and the intuitions of reason a system of civil liberty to supersede worn-out traditional forms; and, just before the alliance between France and the United States, the lighter literature of the hour, skeptical rather than hopeful, mocked at the contradiction between institutions and rights, and asked if while the mutinous Americans, "without kings and without queens, bearded the whole world and were free," Europe should still be crushed by inexorable tyranny. Mirabeau wrote a fiery invective against despotism from a prison of which his passionate prayer for leave to serve in America could not open the doors.

Until chastened by affliction, Marie Antoinette wanted earnestness of character, and suffered herself to be swayed by generous caprices, or family ties, or the selfish solicitations of her female companions. She had an ascendency over the king, and could not always conceal her contempt for his understanding, but never aspired to control his foreign policy, except in relation to Austria. It was only in the pursuit of benefits for her friends that she would suffer no denial. She did not spare words of petulance to a minister who dared to thwart her requests; and Necker retained her favor by never refusing them. Her enthusiasm for the new republic was only superficial and occasional, and could form no support for a steady conduct of the war.

The king felt for the Americans neither as insurgents against wrongs nor as a self-governing people; and never understood how it came about that, contrary to his own faith in monarchical power and in the Catholic church, his kingdom had plunged into a war to introduce among the potentates of the civilized world a revolutionary Protestant republic.

Their

France was rich in resources; but its finances had not recovered from their exhaustion in the seven years' war. restoration became hopeless, when Necker promised to employ the fame of his severer administration only to increase the public debt, which was already too heavy to be borne. The king of Prussia, whose poverty made him a sharp observer of the revenues of wealthier powers, repeatedly foretold the bankruptcy of France if its king should break the peace.

All this while Paris was the centre of the gay society and intelligence of Europe. The best artists of the day and the masters of the rival schools of music crowded round the court. The splendor of the Bourbon monarchy was kept up at the Tuileries and Versailles with prodigal magnificence, and invention was ever devising new refinements in social enjoyment. The queen was happy in the dazzling scenes of which she was the life; the king, a young man of four-and-twenty, whom his Austrian brother-in-law described as a child, was pleased with the absolute power which he held it his right to exercise. To France, the years which followed are among the most glorious in her history, for they were those in which she prepared the way for the overthrow of feudalism and her own regeneration; but Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, when they embarked for the liberation of America, pleasure on the prow and the uncertain hand of youth at the helm, might have cried out to the new republic which they fostered: "Morituri te salutant," "The doomed to die salute thee."

The rescript of France, which announced to the British ministry her acknowledgment of American independence, assumed as a principle of public law that a nationality may, by its own declaration, speak itself into being. The old systems of the two governments were reversed. The British monarchy put forth its strength in behalf of unjust authority, while France became the foster-mother of republicanism. In one respect France was more suited than Britain to lead the peoples of Europe in the road to freedom. On the release of her rural population from serfdom, a large part of them retained their rights to the soil; and, though bowed down under grievous burdens and evil laws, they had a home and acres from which they could not be evicted. In England and Scotland and Ireland "the property by feudal law was strictly in the tenant," but the feudal chiefs had taken to themselves in absolute ownership nearly all the ground.

On the fourth of May the treaties of commerce and alliance with Louis XVI. were unanimously ratified by congress, with grateful acknowledgments of his magnanimous and disinterested conduct, and the "wish that the friendship so happily commenced between France and the United States might be

perpetuated." The rivalries of centuries, in which the Americans had been involved only from their dependence on England, were effaced forever; Frenchmen became their friends, and the king of France was proclaimed "the protector of the rights of mankind.”

Lafayette smiled as, in Washington's camp, he read that his government dated the independence of America from the moment of its own declaration, and said prophetically: "Therein lies a principle of national sovereignty which one day will be recalled to them at home." On the sixth the alliance was celebrated at Valley Forge. After a salute of thirteen cannon and a running fire of all the musketry, the army, drawn up in two lines, shouted: "Long live the king of France!" and again: "Long live the friendly European powers!" and the ceremonies were closed by a huzza for the American states.

In an address to the inhabitants of the United States, congress assumed that independence was secured; and they proclaimed the existence of a new people, though they could not hide its want of a government. They rightly represented its territory as a continental one and most blessed in its climate and productions; they owned its financial embarrassments, because no taxes had been laid to carry on the war; and they invited their countrymen to "bring forth their armies into the field," while men of leisure were encouraged to collect moneys for the public funds. In return for all losses, they promised "the sweets of a free commerce with every part of the earth.”

On the eighteenth of May a festival was given to General Howe by thirty of his officers, most of them members of his staff. The numerous company embarked on the Delaware above the town, and, to the music of one hundred and eight hautboys, rowed two miles down the stream in galleys and boats glittering with colors and streamers. They passed two hundred transport vessels tricked out in bravery and crowded with lookers-on; and, landing to the tune of "God save the King" under salutes from two decorated ships-of-war, they marched between lines of cavalry and infantry and all the standards of the army to a lawn, where, in presence of their chosen ladies raised on thrones, officers, fantastically dressed as knights and squires, engaged in a tournament. After this,