Other interests were formed, other dependencies, other connections,
other communications. The middle classes had swelled far beyond their
former proportion. Like whatever is the most effectively rich and great
in society, these classes became the seat of all the active politics;
and the preponderating weight to decide on them. There were all the
energies by which fortune is acquired; there the consequence of their
success. There were all the talents which assert their pretensions, and
are impatient of the place which settled society prescribes to them.
These descriptions had got between the great and the populace; and the
influence on the lower classes was with them. The spirit of ambition had
taken possession of this class as violent as ever it had done of any
other. They felt the importance of this situation. The correspondence of
the monied and the mercantile world, the literary intercourse of
academies, but, above all, the press, of which they had in a manner
entire possession, made a kind of electric communication everywhere. The
press in reality has made every government, in its spirit, almost
democratic. Without it the great, the first movements in this Revolution
could not, perhaps, have been given. But the spirit of ambition, now for
the first time connected with the spirit of speculation, was not to be
restrained at will.
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