dull. If, however,
they are still satisfied with their solid objection that some men are
dull, I can only gravely agree with them, that some men are very dull.

But a few years after Lafayette had returned from helping to found a
republic in America he was flung over his own frontiers for resisting
the foundation of a republic in France. So furious was the onward stride
of this new spirit that the republican of the new world lived to be the
reactionary of the old. For when France passed from theory to practice,
the question was put to the world in a way not thinkable in connection
with the prefatory experiment of a thin population on a colonial coast.
The mightiest of human monarchies, like some monstrous immeasurable idol
of iron, was melted down in a furnace barely bigger than itself, and
recast in a size equally colossal, but in a shape men could not
understand. Many, at least, could not understand it, and least of all
the liberal aristocracy of England. There were, of course, practical
reasons for a continuous foreign policy against France, whether royal or
republican. There was primarily the desire to keep any foreigner from
menacing us from the Flemish coast; there was, to a much lesser extent,
the colonial rivalry in which so much English glory had been gained by
the statesmanship of Chatham and the arms of Wolfe and of Clive. The
former reason has returned on us with a singular irony; for in order to
keep the French out of Flanders we flung ourselves with increasing
enthusiasm into a fraternity with the Germans. We purposely fed and
pampered the power which was destined in the future to devour Belgium as
France would never have devoured it, and threaten us across the sea
with terrors of which no Frenchman would ever dream. But indeed much
deeper things unified our attitude towards France before and after the
Revolution. It is but one stride from despotism to democracy, in logic
as well as in history; and oligarchy is equally remote from both. The
Bastille fell, and it seemed to an Englishman merely that a despot had
turned into a demos. The young Bonaparte rose, and it seemed to an
Englishman merely that a demos had once more turned into a despot. He
was not wrong in thinking these allotropic forms of the same alien
thing; and that thing was equality. For when millions are equally
subject to one law, it makes little difference if they are also subject
to one lawgiver; the general social life is a level. The one t