WORLD'S POLITICS AND NINETEENTH CENTURY 301 



better undone? What mortal didst thou generously help? What 

 sorrow hadst thou mercy on? Do the five hundred thousand ghosts 

 who sank shamefully on so many battlefields from Rossbach to 

 Quebec, that thy harlot might take revenge for an epigram, crowd 

 round thee in this hour? Thy foul harem! The curse of mothers, 

 the tears and infamy of daughters! Miserable man! thou hast done 

 evil as thou couldst; thy whole existence seems one hideous abortion 

 and mistake of nature." 



Only thus from its causes can the Revolution be justly judged. 

 If it is so viewed, its errors and excesses may be explained and in 

 part condoned, as the inevitable friction generated in producing 

 a great and worthy piece of work against fearful resistance. 



I cannot agree with those writers, like Taine and Sir Henry Maine, 

 who reprobate the Revolution itself, believing that whatever good 

 it wrought could have been accomplished without it. " The French 

 Revolution," declares Bisset, " was the w r ork of philosophers, and it 

 was, compared with the English revolution, a failure and ended in 

 Cffisarism, that is, in the government of hell upon earth*" 



In this hostile mode of estimating the movement, Burke's Reflec- 

 tions led the way, swayed too much in their judgment of it as a whole 

 by the fate of the unfortunate Marie Antoinette, who had so im- 

 pressed the author when in France. 



" It is now sixteen or seventeen years," he says, " since I saw the 

 queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never 

 lighted on this orb, which she scarcely seemed to touch, a more 

 delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and 

 cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering 

 like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. O, what 

 a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without 

 emotion that elevation and that fall! " 



Sir James Mackintosh's Vindiciae Gallicae introduced the apprecia- 

 tive criticism of the Revolution, whose freshest note Frederic Harrison 

 has sounded in saying: " The history of our entire nineteenth cen- 

 tury is precisely the history of all the work which the Revolution left. 

 The Revolution was a creating force even more than it was a destroy- 

 ing force; it was an inexhaustible source of fertile influences; it not 

 only cleared the ground of the old society, but it manifested all the 

 elements of the new society. It would be easy 'to show that the 

 last fifty years of the eighteenth century was a period more fertile in 

 constructive effort than any similar period of fifty years in the history 

 of mankind. . . . Truly we may call the Revolution the crisis of 

 modern reconstruction. 



" ' When France in wrath her giant limbs upreared, 

 And with that oath which smote air, earth and sea, 

 Stamped her strong foot and said she would be free.' " 



