There have been communes, we say, throughout Europe; but there has not really been a victorious third estate anywhere, save in France.

The revolution of 1789, the greatest ever seen, was the culminating point arrived at by the third estate; and France is the only country in which a man of large mind could, in a burst of burgher's pride, exclaim, "What is the third estate?
Everything." Since the explosion, and after all the changes, liberal and illiberal, due to the revolution of 1789, there has been a common-place, ceaselessly repeated, to the effect that there are no more classes in French society -- there is only a nation of thirty-seven millions of persons.

If it be meant that there are now no more privileges in France, no special laws and private rights for such and such families, proprietorships, and occupations, and that legislation is the same, and there is perfect freedom of movement for all, at all steps of the social ladder, it is true; oneness of laws and similarity of rights, is now the essential and characteristic fact of civil society in France, an immense, an excellent, and a novel fact in the history of human associations.

But beneath the dominance of this fact, in the midst of this national unity and this civil equality, there evidently and necessarily exist numerous and important diversities and inequalities, which oneness of laws and similarity of rights neither prevent nor destroy.

In point of property, real or personal, land or capital, there are rich and poor; there are the large, the middling, and the small property.