Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 02.djvu/105

MAY–JUNE 1787] learned from the English, 'that free-will offering of the piety of Christians; on which there are now forty-thousand lawsuits in this realm.' Nay, Lafayette, bound to speak his opinion, went the length, one day, of proposing to convoke a 'National Assembly.' 'You demand States-General?' asked Monseigneur with an air of minatory surprise.—'Yes, Monseigneur; and even better than that.'—'Write it,' said Monseigneur to the Clerks. —Written accordingly it is; and what is more, will be acted by and by.

, then, have the Notables returned home; carrying, to all quarters of France, such notions of deficit, decrepitude, distraction; and that States-General will cure it, or will not cure it but kill it. Each Notable, we may fancy, is as a funereal torch; disclosing hideous abysses, better left hid! The unquietest humour possesses all men; ferments, seeks issue, in pamphleteering, caricaturing, projecting, declaiming; vain jangling of thought, word, and deed.

It is Spiritual Bankruptcy, long tolerated; verging now towards Economical Bankruptcy, and become intolerable. For from the lowest dumb rank, the inevitable misery, as was predicted, has spread upwards. In every man is some obscure feeling that his position, oppressive or else oppressed, is a false one: all men, in one or the other acrid dialect, as assaulters or as defenders, must give vent to the unrest that is in them. Of such stuff national well-being, and the glory of rulers, is not made. O Loménie, what a wild-heaving,