The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 281

of their landlords and were forced to submit to their exorbitant demands.
The burden of supporting both the church and the state fell upon the
middle and lower classes, who were heavily taxed by the civil authorities
and by the clergy. “The pleasure of the nobles was considered the
supreme law; the farmers and the peasants might starve, for aught their
oppressors cared.... The people were compelled at every turn to consult
the exclusive interest of the landlord. The lives of the agricultural
laborers were lives of incessant work and unrelieved misery; their
complaints, if they ever dared to complain, were treated with insolent
contempt. The courts of justice would always listen to a noble as against
a peasant; bribes were notoriously accepted by the judges; and the merest
caprice of the aristocracy had the force of law, by virtue of this system
of universal corruption. Of the taxes wrung from the commonalty, by
the secular magnates on the one hand, and the clergy on the other,
not half ever found its way into the royal or episcopal treasury; the
rest was squandered in profligate self-indulgence. And the men who
thus impover ished their fellow subjects were themselves exempt from
taxation, and entitled by law or custom to all the appointments of the
state. The privileged classes numbered a hundred and fifty thousand,
and for their gratification millions were condemned to hopeless and
degrading lives.” (See Appendix.)
The court was given up to luxury and profligacy. There was little
confidence existing between the people and the rulers. Suspicion
fastened upon all the measures of the government as designing and
selfish. For more than half a century before the time of the Revolution
the throne was occupied by Louis XV, who, even in those evil times,
was distinguished as an indolent, frivolous, and sensual monarch. With a
depraved and cruel aristocracy and an impoverished and ignorant lower
class, the state financially embarrassed and the people exasperated, it
needed no prophet’s eye to foresee a terrible impending outbreak. To the
warnings of his counselors the king was accustomed to reply: “Try to

280