A part of these fortunes were
represented by the Parliamentary boroughs which the landlords owned and
which were confiscated by the Reform Bill, and these boroughs were held by
Lord Eldon to be incorporeal hereditaments: as truly a part of the private
property of the gentry who owned them as church advowsons, or the like.
And the gentry held to their law-making power which gave them such a
privilege with a tenacity which precipitated two wars before they yielded;
but this was naught compared to the social convulsion which rent France,
when a population which had been for centuries restrained from free
domestic movement, burst its bonds and insisted on levelling the barriers
which had immobilized it.
The story of the French Revolution is too familiar to need recapitulation
here: indeed, I have already dealt with it in my _Social Revolutions_; but
the effects of that convulsion are only now beginning to appear, and these
effects, without the shadow of a doubt, have been in their ultimate
development the occasion of that great war whose conclusion we still
await.
France, in 1792, having passed into a revolution which threatened the
vested interests of Prussia, was attacked by Prussia, who was defeated at
Valmy. Presently, France retaliated, under Napoleon, invaded Prussia,
crushed her army at Jena, in 1807, dismembered the kingdom and imposed on
her many hardships.
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