Page:Readings in European History Vol 2.djvu/315

 The Ascendency of France under Louis XIV 277 princes." Grandeur separates men for a little time, but a common fall makes them all equal at the end. O kings, exercise your power then boldly, for it is divine and salutary for human kind, but exercise it with humility. You are endowed with it from without. At bottom it leaves you feeble, it leaves you mortal, it leaves you sinners, and charges you before God with a very heavy account. III. Colbert and his Work The finances of France were in an almost chronic state of disorder. It was financial difficulties which were finally to prove the immediate cause of the great French Revolution in 1789. The picture which Colbert gives of the situation before he became minister is, on the whole, a fair account of the conditions which pre- vailed during the succeeding century and which we find on the eve of the French Revolution. As we have had only examples of want and necessity in 336. Col- our finances since the death of Henry IV, it will be well to determine how it has come about that for so long a time financial there has not been, if not abundance, at least a tolerably disorders satisfactory income, — something else than dearth and desti- tution, some approximation of equality between output and revenue. . . . During the twenty years immediately following the death of Henry IV, the superintendents of the finances either gorged themselves with wealth, — all the other financial officials following their example, — or, if they were upright men, they did not have sufficient penetration to perceive the abuses, malfeasance, thefts, and waste which went on under cover of their authority, and even under their eyes, so that the state was always in need. It even happened that the incompetency of the superintendents was com- monly more prejudicial to the state and the people than their personal thefts, seeing that there never was a time when the bert's ac- count of the