Page:Public School History of England and Canada (1892).djvu/168

 no longer needed. The next year saw the beginning of the French Revolution, and from this time onward Pitt’s plans for lessening the debt and carrying out great reforms at home had to be dropped. The causes of this Revolution may be traced a long way back. For many years the French people had been very badly governed, the poor and the working classes having to pay all the taxes, while the nobles and clergy did nothing but spend the earnings of the peasants, labourers, and artisans. But the time came when the heavy expenses of the French court could not be paid out of the taxes of the poor, and then the French king, Louis XVI., called together the French Parliament, or “States-General,” to get money from the nobles and clergy. There were three branches of this States-General; for the nobles, the clergy, and the commons, sat and voted in separate chambers. When the Parliament met the commons would do no business until the nobles and clergy consented to meet and vote in the same assembly with them. The new assembly thus formed became known as the “National Assembly.” The National Assembly soon began to make many changes giving the people more freedom, and taking away much of the power of the king, nobles, and clergy. In July, 1789, the Paris mob attacked and took the Bastille, a great stone fortress and prison on the Seine, where many innocent people had met a mysterious fate. A little later the king was forced by the mob to leave his palace at Versailles and take up his abode in Paris, where he was kept a kind of prisoner. Once he tried to escape, but his flight was discovered and he was brought back. Then Austria and Prussia made war upon France to put Louis in his old position, and this so enraged the Paris mob that it broke into the prisons and murdered a great number of royalist prisoners. This was in September, 1792. A few months afterwards, Louis and his queen, Marie Antoinette, were put to death for plotting the invasion of France by Austria and Prussia. While these events were taking place in France the English people looked on quietly. Pitt, at first, was pleased with the Revolution, as he thought the French were trying to get the same kind of government as existed in England. Fox was delighted; but Edmund Burke spoke and wrote against the revolutionists with all his great genius and eloquence. Burke’s speeches had little effect for a time, but when the French went from one excess to another, then Burke’s writings began to be widely read, and people grew