The rules of the Royal Institution forbid (and wisely) religious or political controversy.  It was therefore impossible for me in these Lectures, to say much which had to be said, in drawing a just and complete picture of the Ancien Régime in France.  The passages inserted between brackets, which bear on religious matters, were accordingly not spoken at the Royal Institution. But more.  It was impossible for me in these Lectures, to bring forward as fully as I could have wished, the contrast bet

[Delivered at the Royal Institution, London, 1867.] These Lectures are meant to be comments on the state of France before the French Revolution.  To English society, past or present, I do not refer.  For reasons which I have set forth at length in an introductory discourse, there never was any Ancien Régime in England. Therefore, when the Stuarts tried to establish in England a system which might have led to a political condition like that of the Continent, all classes combined and exterminated

The degradation of the European nobility caused, of course, the increase of the kingly power, and opened the way to central despotisms.  The bourgeoisie, the commercial middle class, whatever were its virtues, its value, its real courage, were never able to stand alone against the kings.  Their capital, being invested in trade, was necessarily subject to such sudden dangers from war, political change, bad seasons, and so forth, that its holders, however individually brave, were timid as a class.

In a former lecture in this Institution, I said that the human race owed more to the eighteenth century than to any century since the Christian era.  It may seem a bold assertion to those who value duly the century which followed the revival of Greek literature, and consider that the eighteenth century was but the child, or rather grandchild, thereof.  But I must persist in my opinion, even though it seem to be inconsistent with my description of the very same era as one of decay and death.  For