ssage of
his speech of 7th May 1794. proposing the decree for the worship of
the Supreme Being (see the text in Stephen, Orators of the French
Revolution, ii. 391-92).] The theory of equality seemed no longer merely
speculative; for the American constitution was founded on democratic
equality, whereas the English constitution, which before had seemed
the nearest approximation to the ideal of freedom, was founded on
inequality. The philosophical polemic of the masters was waged with
weapons of violence by the disciples. Chaumette and Hebert, the
followers of d'Holbach, were destroyed by the disciples of Rousseau. In
the name of the creed of the Vicaire Savoyard the Jacobin Club shattered
the bust of Helvetius. Mably and Morelly had their disciples in Babeuf
and the socialists.

A naive confidence that the political upheaval meant regeneration and
inaugurated a reign of justice and happiness pervaded France in the
first period of the Revolution, and found a striking expression in the
ceremonies of the universal "Federation" in the Champ-de-Mars on 14th
July 1790. The festival was theatrical enough, decreed and arranged by
the Constituent Assembly, but the enthusiasm and optimism of the people
who gathered to swear loyalty to the new Constitution were genuine and
spontaneous. Consciously or subconsciously they were under the influence
of the doctrine of Progress which leaders of opinion had for several
decades been insinuating into the public mind. It did not occur to them
that their oaths and fraternal embraces did not change their minds
or hearts, and that, as Taine remarked, they remained what ages of
political subjection and one age of political literature had made them.
The assumption that new social machinery could alter human nature and
create a heaven upon earth was to be swiftly and terribly confuted.

Post uarios casus et tot discrimina rerum
uenimus in Latium,

but Latium was to be the scene of sanguinary struggles.

Another allied and fundamental fallacy, into which all the philosophers
and Rousseau had more or less fallen, was reflected and exposed by the
Revolution. They had considered man in vacuo. They had not seen that
the whole development of a society is an enormous force which cannot be
talked or legislated away; they had ignored the power of social memory
and historical traditions, and misvalued the strength of the links which
bind generations together. So the Revolutionaries imagined that th