remarkable. In England the material condition of the country was good, under the regime 134 of successful whiggery; the middle classes were prosperous and contented; the working classes were keeping their heads above water in tolerable comfort, and nothing was further from their thoughts than that revolutionary change, to which nevertheless they were drifting swiftly but quietly.
On the other hand, France was impoverished by the long wars of the Grand Monarch; the lower classes were sunk in misery obvious to the most superficial observer. The commercial middle classes were discontented and uneasy under the pressure of the remains of feudalism, which seemed to them to be still flourishing, though it was but the lifeless trunk of the old tree, already sapped by Louis XIV. To crown all there was a spirit of intellectual dissaffection in the air. The theories of liberty and rationalism, though originally derived from English thinkers, were developed and put into literary form by the coterie of French writers (already mentioned) who took the name of Les Philosophes, and in this form they produced far more effects than they did in the country of their birth, 135 supplying the formulae of the actual Revolution. The names of Voltaire and Rousseau, even apart from the Encyclopædists, show how eagerly the new theories were being received. In short the whole aspect of affairs was far more dramatic in France than in England; as was likely to be the case, since in France the Revolution was doomed to be primarily political, and in England mainly industrial.
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