Note 45 — Front matter (continued 2)

"On the very threshold of the business he must propose to make the clergy, the noblesse, the very Parliament subject to taxes! One shriek of indignation and astonishment reverberates through all the chateau galleries. M. de Maurepas has to gyrate. The poor king, who had written (to Turgot) a few weeks ago, 'Il n'y a que vous et moi qui aimions le peuple' (There is none but you and I who love the people), must now write a dismissal, and let the French Revolution accomplish itself pacifically or not, as it can."—Carlyle, French Revolution, i., 41.

"The nobles and the prelates, it seems, considered themselves degraded if they were to contribute to the repair of the roads; and they would no doubt have declared that their dignity and their existence, the very rights of property itself, were endangered, if they were now, for the first time, they would have said, in the history of the monarchy, to be subjected to the visits of the tax-gatherer."—Lectures on the French Revolution, by Wm. Smyth, vol. i., p. 102.