372 A BRIEF SURVEY OF HUMAN HISTORY

The deluge came inevitably under the next ruler, the un-
fortunate Louis XVI (1774-92), who had to pay for the sins
of his predecessors with his own life. In this he was most
unlike Charles I of England who under similar circumstances
had died on the scaffold. Charles Stuart was a sturdy be-
liever in the Divine Right of Kings; Louis Capet was a
well-meaning but will-less victim of circumstances.
Charles was a martyr; Louis was a scapegoat. But both
stood athwart the current of a nation's public interest,
and both were overwhelmed. Up till then monarchs had
victimised nations; thereafter nations were to victimise
monarchs. The fall of the Bastille was, therefore, only a
symbolic episode like Hampden's refusal to pay ship-money
or the American gesture of throwing away packets of Bri-
tish-borne tea into Boston harbour. Once the turbulent
-stream burst through its dam, it followed its own course in
a hundred different channels.

The root cause of the Revolution, according to Napoleon,
was Vanity; but this word must be understood to compre-
hend all the sins of Grand Monarchy. Their net result was
national bankruptcy; that is to say, the ruin of public
finance. All who stood for the Old Order (King and
noblesse] desperately sought remedies in fresh schemes of
taxation of an already over-taxed people. They had been
•exploited to the limit of impossibility. "To raise more
revenue by taxation," observes Professor Alison Phillips,
" was impossible so long as the privileged orders remained ex-
empt ; and successive controllers-general of the finances were
driven to the ruinous expedient of borrowing in order to
.cover the ordinary expenses of the State. Those who, like
Turgot, tried to cure the evil at its source were broken by
Court intrigues; Turgot fell in 1776, after scarce two years
in office; Necker, the Swiss banker, whose supposed finan-