60 Chapter III
politics at an early age. This advantage, if it was one, was by no means limited to
England. It was clearly due to the influence of aristocratic family connections; and
was probably as widespread as this influence. In England the average age of com-
mercial men on entrance into the House of Commons was 40, that of country
gentlemen 32; in Silesia the average age of commoners upon appointment to the
governing boards was 42, that of noblemen 27. Over half the members of the Par-
lement of Paris immediately before the French Revolution were under 35. We
have just seen that half the members of the Parlement of Grenoble took their seats
before their twenty- fifth birthday. In England it was only a quarter of the Com-
mons who first took their seats at age 25 or before; but members who had had fa-
thers or grandfathers in the House entered at an age averaging nine years younger
than for others. We often hear of the youth of the French revolutionaries; we may
fail to realize that the governing aristocracies of the eighteenth century were com-
posed to a large extent of young men also.^31
Ability cannot be so readily measured. There was William Pitt, prime minister
at twenty- four, and a man of great talents and understanding in certain fields. It is
impossible to say how many other youthful magistrates or politicians were like
him, in England or elsewhere. What one knows of eighteenth- century Oxford
makes one hesitate to generalize on the side of optimism; the studies at Oxford
were no more difficult, and no more enlightening, than those required of young
men at Grenoble. And as for the practical wisdom not to be learned at school, even
Holdsworth, while praising the old House of Commons as a working institution,
allows that the way in which it lost America, and alienated Ireland, constitute
grave exceptions to the story of its wisdom and its triumphs. Birth and upbringing
in a governing class doubtless give advantages to young men of ability and serious
habits; but governing classes also produce other young men for whom a place must
be found.
Another difficulty lay in the field of taxation. Outside of England, kings had
pacified their nobles by granting them tax exemptions, and the republican patri-
cians allowed various tax advantages to themselves. It is commonplace to observe
that France was a rich country with a chronically impoverished government, that
the inability to tax the wealthy, who were largely noble (though not all nobles were
wealthy), was the basic cause of the French budgetary crisis, the mounting debt,
insolvency, and revolution. Similar problems, perhaps less acute, existed elsewhere.
A Dutch writer observes that the eighteenth- century United Provinces were a rich
country with a poor government, and ascribes their decline as an international
power in part to that fact.^32 In fact the Dutch debt was about fifteen times as heavy
per capita as the French debt in the 1780’s. An Austrian writer remarks that cer-
31 On the House of Commons see the works of Namier and Judd cited in note 23 of Chapter II.
Holdsworth and Turberville also observe that the great Whigs hesitated to put into the cabinet,
though not into Parliament, anyone who was not “one of themselves,” and cite the fact that Edmund
Burke never attained cabinet rank; see Holdsworth, Law Quarterly Review, XLV, 331. For Silesia see
H. Rosenberg, op. cit., 106; for France, J. Egret, “L’aristocratie parlementaire française à la fin de
l’ancien régime,” in Revue historique, 208 (1952), 1–14.
32 I. H. Gosse and N. Japikse, Handboek tot de staatkundige Geschiedenis van Nederland (The
Hague, 1947), 639.