The richer classes
must enjoy the widest liberty practicable, since they had a stake in
the country. To the Government he wished the utmost force possible,
its interests being the same as those of the rich and the bourgeois,
viz. to render the lowest class happy and to aggrandize the middle
class, in which resided the veritable puissance of States. If rich
people and the hereditary fortunes of the Upper Chamber, corrupted by
their manners and customs, engendered certain abuses, these were
inseparable from all society, and must be accepted with the advantages
they yielded.
This conception of the classes and the masses which he afterwards set
forth more fully in his _Country Doctor_ and _Village Cure_, partly
explains why all his best work, besides being impregnated with
fatalism, has such a constant outlook on the past. It was a dogma with
him rather than a philosophy, and was clung to more from taste than
from reasonable conviction. He believed in aristocratic prerogative,
because he believed in himself, and ranked himself as high as, or
rather higher than, the noble. This was at the bottom of his doctrine;
but he was glad all the same to have his claim supported by such
outward signs of the inward grace as were afforded by vague genealogy
and the homage of the great.
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