was now to gain all the blessings of free government with which America was familiar.  Our glorious example, it was clear, was destined to change the world, and monarchies and despotisms were to disappear.  There was to be a new political birth for all the nations, and the reign of peace and good-will was to come at once upon the earth at the hands of liberated peoples freely governing themselves.  It was a natural delusion, and a kindly one.  History, in the modern sense, was still unwritten, and men did not then understand that the force and character of a revolution are determined by the duration and intensity of the tyranny and misgovernment which have preceded and caused it.  The vast benefit destined to flow from the French revolution was to come many years after all those who saw it begin were in their graves, but at the moment it was expected to arrive immediately, and in a form widely different from that which, in the slow process of time, it ultimately assumed.  Moreover, Americans did not realize that the well-ordered liberty of the English-speaking race was something unknown and inconceivable to the French.

There were a few Americans who were never deceived for a moment, even by their hopes.  Hamilton, who “divined Europe,” as Talleyrand said, and Gouverneur Morris, studying the situation on the spot with keen and practical observation, soon apprehended the truth, while others more or less quickly followed in their wake.  But Washington, whom no one ever credited with divination, and who never crossed the Atlantic, saw the realities of the thing sooner, and looked more deeply into the future than anybody else.  No man lived more loyal than he, or more true to the duties of gratitude; but he looked upon the world of facts with vision never dimmed nor dazzled, and watched in silence, while others slept and dreamed.  Let us follow his letters for a moment.  In October, 1789, in the first flush of hope and sympathy, he wrote to Morris:  “The revolution which has been effected in France is of so wonderful a nature that the mind can hardly realize the fact.  If it ends as our last accounts to the first of August predict, that nation will be the most powerful and happy in Europe; but I fear though it has gone triumphantly through the first paroxysm, it is not the last it has to encounter before matters are finally settled.  In a word, the revolution is of too great magnitude to be effected in so short a space, and with the loss of so little blood....  To forbear running from one extreme to another is no easy matter; and should this be the case, rocks and shelves, not visible at present, may wreck the vessel, and give a higher-toned despotism than the one which existed before.”