cess with the country.]

Within the walls of Parliament however Burke as yet stood utterly alone.
His "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs," in June 1791, failed to
detach a follower from Fox; while Pitt coldly counselled him rather to
praise the English Constitution than to rail at the French. "I have made
many enemies and few friends," Burke wrote sadly to the French princes
who had fled from their country and were gathering in arms at Coblentz,
"by the part I have taken." But the opinion of the people was slowly
drifting to his side; and a sale of thirty thousand copies showed that
the "Reflections" echoed the general sentiment of Englishmen. At this
moment indeed the mood of England was singularly unfavourable to any
fair appreciation of the Revolution across the Channel. Her temper was
above all industrial. Men who were working hard and fast growing rich,
who had the narrow and practical turn of men of business, looked angrily
at this sudden disturbance of order, this restless and vague activity,
these rhetorical appeals to human feeling, these abstract and often
empty theories. In England it was a time of political content and social
well-being, of steady economic progress, as well as of a powerful
religious revival; and an insular lack of imaginative interest in other
races hindered men from seeing that every element of this content, of
this order, of this peaceful and harmonious progress, of this
reconciliation of society and religion, was wanting abroad. The
sympathy which the first outbreak of the Revolution had roused among
Englishmen grew cooler in fact with every step which the Revolution
took. While the Declaration of the Rights of Man roused France to a
frenzy of enthusiasm, it was set aside as a dream by the practical
islanders who based their rights on precedent and not on theory. The
abolition of all social privileges on the 12th of August, the most
characteristic step in the French Revolution, was met with grave
disapproval by a people more alien from social equality than any people
in Europe. Every incident in the struggle between the French people and
their king widened the breach of feeling. The anarchy of the country,
the want of political sense in its Assembly, the paltry declamation of
its clubs, the exaggerated sentiment, the universal suspicion, the
suspension of every security for personal freedom, the arrests, the
murders, the overthrow of the Church, the ruin of the Crown, were
watched wit