he conservatism of the age was unconquerable.
Republicanism was distorted even in Switzerland, and became in the
eighteenth century as oppressive and as intolerant as its neighbours.

In 1769, when Paoli fled from Corsica, it seemed that, in Europe at
least, democracy was dead. It had, indeed, lately been defended in books
by a man of bad reputation, whom the leaders of public opinion treated
with contumely, and whose declamations excited so little alarm that
George III. offered him a pension. What gave to Rousseau a power far
exceeding that which any political writer had ever attained was the
progress of events in America. The Stuarts had been willing that the
colonies should serve as a refuge from their system of Church and State,
and of all their colonies the one most favoured was the territory
granted to William Penn. By the principles of the Society to which he
belonged, it was necessary that the new State should be founded on
liberty and equality. But Penn was further noted among Quakers as a
follower of the new doctrine of Toleration. Thus it came to pass that
Pennsylvania enjoyed the most democratic constitution in the world, and
held up to the admiration of the eighteenth century an almost solitary
example of freedom. It was principally through Franklin and the Quaker
State that America influenced political opinion in Europe, and that the
fanaticism of one revolutionary epoch was converted into the rationalism
of another. American independence was the beginning of a new era, not
merely as a revival of Revolution, but because no other Revolution ever
proceeded from so slight a cause, or was ever conducted with so much
moderation. The European monarchies supported it. The greatest statesmen
in England averred that it was just. It established a pure democracy;
but it was democracy in its highest perfection, armed and vigilant, less
against aristocracy and monarchy than against its own weakness and
excess. Whilst England was admired for the safeguards with which, in the
course of many centuries, it had fortified liberty against the power of
the crown, America appeared still more worthy of admiration for the
safeguards which, in the deliberations of a single memorable year, it
had set up against the power of its own sovereign people. It resembled
no other known democracy, for it respected freedom, authority, and law.
It resembled no other constitution, for it was contained in half a dozen
intelligible articles. Ancie