Two hundred and thirty forts or redoubts.
Three thousand eight hundred cannon.
Seventy thousand muskets.
Ninety flags.
As Benjamin Constant has observed, nothing can change the stupendous
fact "that the Convention found the enemy at thirty leagues from Paris,
... and made peace at thirty leagues from Vienna."
Under the stimulus of a change in environment of mind is apt to expand
with something of this resistless energy. It did so in the Reformation.
It may be said almost invariably to do so, when decay does not
supervene, and it now concerns us to consider, in some rough way, what
the cost to the sinking class of attempting repression may be, when it
miscalculates its power in such an emergency.
I take it to be tolerably clear that, if the French privileged classes
had accepted the reforms of Turgot in good faith, and thus had spread
the movement of the revolution over a generation, there would have been
no civil war and no confiscations, save confiscations of ecclesiastical
property. I take it also that there would have been no massacres and no
revolutionary tribunals, if France in 1793 had fought foreign enemies
alone, as England did in 1688.
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