of the Susquehannah; Godwin, not yet "fallen on evil days," incorporated the principles of the Revolution in his Political Justice. Fox hailed the storming of the Bastile by the Parisians as the greatest event in history. If such were the feeling of Englishmen, what was the thrill of expectation in those countries adjoining France, still sorely pressed down by the shackles of Feudalism!
In France itself—where all artificial barriers obstructing the free intercourse of province with province had been abolished; where the taxes had been equitably distributed; where the division of the kingdom into districts was the basis of a system of electoral franchise approximately proportioned to population; where the suppression of monasteries, the sale of Church property, and the abolition of feudal rents, not only threw an enormous quantity of land into the market, but, by relieving the small proprietors from the pressure of innumerable trammels, infused the vigour of a new life into agriculture—in France itself, in spite of the vindictive plotting of emigrants and the smouldering rage of the clergy, there was a buoyant hope that, the Constitution once established, the regeneration of the country might be peaceably consummated. Had not the King unexpectedly gone to the Assembly, expressed adhesion to the new Constitution, exhorted them all to follow his example, taken the civic oath, and was not all France likewise about to swear it in a rapture of enthusiasm?
And now, in this spring of 1790, a spontaneous movement, originating in the heart of the people itself, swept the surface of national life with its quickening vernal breath. The conception of no single mind nor the watchword of a party, the
