Distrust and anger against a government putting all fortunes at risk, rancor and hostility against a nobility barring all roads to popular advancement, are, then, the sentiments developing themselves among the middle class solely due to their advance in wealth and culture. —­ We can imagine the effect of the new philosophy upon people with such attitudes.  At first, confined to the aristocratic reservoir, the doctrine filters out through numerous cracks like so many trickling streams, to scatter imperceptibly among the lower class.  Already, in 1727, Barbier, a bourgeois of the old school and having little knowledge of philosophy and philosophers except the name, writes in his journal: 

“A hundred poor families are deprived of the annuities on which they supported themselves, acquired with bonds for which the capital is obliterated; 56,000 livres are given in pensions to people who have held the best offices, where they have amassed considerable property, always at the expense of the people, and all this merely that they may rest themselves and do nothing."[24]

One by one, reformative ideas penetrate to his office of consulting advocate; conversation has sufficed to propagate them, homely common sense needing no philosophy to secure their recognition.

“The tax on property,” said he, in 1750, “should be proportioned and equally distributed among all the king’s subjects and the members of the government, in proportion to the property each really possesses in the kingdom; in England, the lands of the nobility, the clergy and the Third-Estate pay alike without distinction, and nothing is more just.”

In the six years which follow the flood increases.  People denounce the government in the cafés, on their promenades, while the police dare not arrest malcontents “because they would have to arrest everybody.”  The disaffection goes on increasing up to the end of the reign.  In 1744, says the bookseller Hardy, during the king’s illness at Metz, private individuals cause six thousand masses to be said for his recovery and pay for them at the sacristy of Notre Dame; in 1757, after Damiens’s attempt on the king’s life, the number of masses demanded is only six hundred; in 1774, during the malady which carries him off, the number falls down to three.  The complete discredit of the government, the immense success of Rousseau, these two events, occurring simultaneously, afford a date for the conversion of the Third-Estate to philosophy[25].  A traveler, at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI, who returns home after some years’ absence, on being asked what change he noticed in the nation, replied, “Nothing, except that what used to be talked about in the drawing-rooms is repeated in the streets."[26] And that which is repeated in the streets is Rousseau’s doctrine, the Discourse on Inequality, the Social Contract amplified, popularized and repeated by adherents in every possible way and in all their forms.  What could be more