232
The Great Controversy 1888
cultural laborers were lives of incessant work and unrelieved misery;
their complaints, if they ever dared to complain, were treated with
insolent contempt. The courts of justice would always listen to a noble
as against a peasant; bribes were notoriously accepted by the judges;
and the merest caprice of the aristocracy had the force of law, by virtue
of this system of universal corruption. Of the taxes wrung from the
commonalty, by the secular magnates on the one hand, and the clergy
on the other, not half ever found its way into the royal or episcopal
treasury; the rest was squandered in profligate self-indulgence. And
the men who thus impoverished their fellow-subjects were themselves
exempt from taxation, and entitled by law or custom to all the appoint-
ments of the State. The privileged classes numbered a hundred and
fifty thousand, and for their gratification millions were condemned to
hopeless and degrading lives.”
The court was given up to luxury and profligacy. There was lit-
tle confidence existing between the people and the rulers. Suspicion
fastened upon all the measures of the government, as designing and
selfish. For more than half a century before the time of the Revolution,
the throne was occupied by Louis XV., who even in those evil times
was distinguished as an indolent, frivolous, and sensual monarch. With
a depraved and cruel aristocracy and an impoverished and ignorant
lower class, the State financially embarrassed, and the people exas-
perated, it needed no prophet’s eye to foresee a terrible impending
outbreak. To the warnings of his counselors the king was accustomed
to reply, “Try to make things go on as long as I am likely to live;
after my death it may be as it will.” It was in vain that the necessity of
reform was urged. He saw the evils, but had neither the courage nor
the power to meet them. The doom awaiting France was but too truly
pictured in his indolent and selfish answer,—“After me the deluge!”
[281]
By working upon the jealousy of the kings and the ruling classes,
Rome had influenced them to keep the people in bondage, well know-
ing that the State would thus be weakened, and purposing by this
means to fasten both rulers and people in her thrall. With far-sighted
policy she perceived that in order to enslave men effectually, the shack-
les must be bound upon their souls; that the surest way to prevent them
from escaping their bondage was to render them incapable of freedom.
A thousand-fold more terrible than the physical suffering which re-
sulted from her policy, was the moral degradation. Deprived of the