American Institutions and Their Influence | Page 7

a priest in the midst
of nobles, and not unfrequently above the heads of kings.
The different relations of men became more complicated and more
numerous, as society gradually became more stable and more civilized.
Thence the want of civil laws was felt; and the order of legal
functionaries soon rose from the obscurity of the tribunals and their
dusty chambers, to appear at the court of the monarch, by the side of
the feudal barons in their ermine and their mail.
While the kings were ruining themselves by their great enterprises, and
the nobles exhausting their resources by private wars, the lower orders
were enriching themselves by commerce. The influence of money
began to be perceptible in state affairs. The transactions of business
opened a new road to power, and the financier rose to a station of
political influence in which he was at once flattered and despised.
Gradually the spread of mental acquirements, and the increasing taste

for literature and art, opened chances of success to talent; science
became the means of government, intelligence led to social power, and
the man of letters took a part in the affairs of the state.
The value attached to the privileges of birth, decreased in the exact
proportion in which new paths were struck out to advancement. In the
eleventh century nobility was beyond all price; in the thirteenth it might
be purchased; it was conferred for the first time in 1270; and equality
was thus introduced into the government by the aristocracy itself.
In the course of these seven hundred years, it sometimes happened that,
in order to resist the authority of the crown, or to diminish the power of
their rivals, the nobles granted a certain share of political rights to the
people. Or, more frequently the king permitted the lower orders to
enjoy a degree of power, with the intention of repressing the
aristocracy.
In France the kings have always been the most active and the most
constant of levellers. When they were strong and ambitious, they
spared no pains to raise the people to the level of the nobles; when they
were temperate or weak, they allowed the people to rise above
themselves. Some assisted the democracy by their talents, others by
their vices. Louis XI. and Louis XIV. reduced every rank beneath the
throne to the same subjection; Louis XV. descended, himself and all his
court, into the dust.
As soon as land was held on any other than a feudal tenure, and
personal property began in its turn to confer influence and power, every
improvement which was introduced in commerce or manufacture, was
a fresh element of the equality of conditions. Henceforward every new
discovery, every new want which it engendered, and every new desire
which craved satisfaction, was a step toward the universal level. The
taste for luxury, the love of war, the sway of fashion, the most
superficial, as well as the deepest passions of the human heart,
co-operated to enrich the poor and to empoverish the rich.
From the time when the exercise of the intellect became the source of
strength and of wealth, it is impossible not to consider every addition to
science, every fresh truth, and every new idea, as a germe of power
placed within the reach of the people. Poetry, eloquence, and memory,
the grace of wit, the glow of imagination, the depth of thought, and all
the gifts which are bestowed by Providence with an equal hand, turned

to the advantage of the democracy; and even when they were in the
possession of its adversaries, they still served its cause by throwing into
relief the natural greatness of man; its conquests spread, therefore, with
those of civilisation and knowledge; and literature became an arsenal,
where the poorest and weakest could always find weapons to their
hand.
In perusing the pages of our history, we shall scarcely meet with a
single great event, in the lapse of seven hundred years, which has not
turned to the advantage of equality.
The crusades and the wars of the English decimated the nobles, and
divided their possessions; the erection of communes introduced an
element of democratic liberty into the bosom of feudal monarchy; the
invention of firearms equalized the villain and the noble on the field of
battle; printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes;
the post was organized so as to bring the same information to the door
of the poor man's cottage and to the gate of the palace; and
protestantism proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to
heaven. The discovery of America offered a thousand new paths to
fortune, and placed riches and power within the reach of the
adventurous and the obscure.
If we examine what has happened in France