hope of
softening the divine displeasure. It is the law of nature, which is
the law of God."

I cannot resist the inference from these passages that Burke, after
1770, underwent other influences than those of his reputed masters,
the Whigs of 1688. And if we find that strain of unwonted thought in a
man who afterwards gilded the old order of things and wavered as to
toleration and the slave trade, we may expect that the same causes
would operate in France.

When the _Letters of a Pennsylvanian Farmer_ became known in Europe,
Diderot said that it was madness to allow Frenchmen to read such
things, as they could not do it without becoming intoxicated and
changed into different men. But France was impressed by the event more
than by the literature that accompanied it. America had made herself
independent under less provocation than had ever been a motive of
revolt, and the French Government had acknowledged that her cause was
righteous and had gone to war for it. If the king was right in
America, he was utterly wrong at home, and if the Americans acted
rightly, the argument was stronger, the cause was a hundredfold
better, in France itself. All that justified their independence
condemned the Government of their French allies. By the principle that
taxation without representation is robbery, there was no authority so
illegitimate as that of Lewis XVI. The force of that demonstration was
irresistible, and it produced its effect where the example of England
failed. The English doctrine was repelled at the very earliest stage
of the Revolution, and the American was adopted. What the French took
from the Americans was their theory of revolution, not their theory of
government--their cutting, not their sewing. Many French nobles served
in the war, and came home republicans and even democrats by
conviction. It was America that converted the aristocracy to the
reforming policy, and gave leaders to the Revolution. "The American
Revolution," says Washington, "or the peculiar light of the age, seems
to have opened the eyes of almost every nation in Europe, and a spirit
of equal liberty appears fast to be gaining ground everywhere." When
the French officers were leaving, Cooper, of Boston, addressed them in
the language of warning: "Do not let your hopes be inflamed by our
triumphs on this virgin soil. You will carry our sentiments with you,
but if you try to plant them in a country that has been corrupt for
centuries, you will en