ht nothing but evil could come of, what was
happening in France, and he feared disasters for his own country if it
became impregnated with the poison of the revolutionary doctrine. That
Fox should in any way advocate that doctrine made him in Burke's eyes an
enemy of England, and not merely of England but of the whole human race.
There was no middle way with Burke. Those who were not with him were
against him, not merely as a politician, but as a man. To the day of his
death, in 1797, he hated the Revolution and denied his friendship to
those who expressed anything less than execration for its principles and
its makers. Although it is always easy to exaggerate the influence that
any single spirit may have upon a movement embracing {300} many
nationalities and many different orders of mind, it would be difficult to
overestimate the effect of Burke's words and Burke's actions in animating
the coalition of monarchical Europe against insurgent France. And upon a
responsibility for the intervention of other States in the affairs of
France depends also a proportionate degree of responsibility for the
results of that intervention. Burke was to see all the horrors he had so
eloquently anticipated realized as the direct consequence of the invasion
of France by the allied armies. The French people in the very hour in
which they believed their cherished revolution to be an accomplished fact
saw it menaced by the formidable league which proposed to bring the
King's brothers back in triumph from Coblentz, and which threatened, in
the extraordinary language to which Brunswick put his name, to blot Paris
from the map of Europe if any injury were done to the King, who had
already formally accepted the constitution that the Revolution had
created. Paris went mad with fear and rage. The September massacres,
the attacks upon the Tuileries, the proclaimed republicanism of the
Convention, the rise of the men of the Mountain, Marat, Danton, and
Robespierre, the execution first of the King and then of the Queen, the
dominion of the guillotine and the Reign of Terror, were the direct
results of a coalition whose only excuse would have been its complete
success. The coalition proved to be an absolute failure. To the cry
that the country was in danger ragged legions of desperate men rushed to
the frontiers, and, to the astonishment of the world, proved more than a
match for the armies that were sent against them.

[Sidenote: 1789-92--P