rench royal despotism brought as a
consequence the excesses of the Revolutionary democracy. The Reign of
Terror in its turn made Englishmen more than ever suspicious of the
application of rational political ideas to the fabric of English
society. So the ball was tossed back and forth--the national temperament
of each people being at once profoundly modified by this action and
reaction and for the same cause profoundly distinguished one from the
other. The association has been more beneficial to France than to
England, because the French, both before and after the Revolution,
really tried to learn something from English political experience,
whereas the English have never been able to discover anything in the
political experience of their neighbors, except an awful example of the
danger of democratic ideas and political and social rationalism.

The ideas of the French democracy were in the beginning revolutionary,
disorderly, and subversive of national consistency and good faith. No
doubt the French democracy had a much better excuse for identifying
democracy with a system of abstract rights and an indiscriminate
individualism than had the American democracy. The shadow of the Old
Regime hung over the country; and it seemed as if the newly won civil
and political rights could be secured only by erecting them into
absolute conditions of just political association and by surrounding
them with every possible guarantee. Moreover, the natural course of the
French democratic development was perverted by foreign interference and
a constant condition of warfare; and if the French nation had been
allowed to seek its own political salvation without interference, as was
this English nation, the French democracy might have been saved many an
error and excess. But whatever excuses may be found for the disorders of
the French democracy, the temporary effect of the democratic idea upon
the national fabric was, undoubtedly, a rending of the roots of their
national stability and good feeling. The successive revolutionary
explosions, which have constituted so much of French history since 1789,
have made France the victim of what sometimes seem to be mutually
exclusive conceptions of French national well-being. The democratic
radicals are "intransigeant." The party of tradition and authority is
"ultramontane." The majority of moderate and sensible people are usually
in control; but their control is unstable. The shadow of the Terror and
th