which began faintly to take a definite practical shape first in America,
and then in France, towards the end of the eighteenth century; they had
been directly prepared by a small number of energetic thinkers, whose
speculations represented, as always, the prolongation of some old lines
of thought in obedience to the impulse of new social and intellectual
conditions. While one movement supplied the energy and the principles
which extricated civilisation from the ruins of the Roman empire, the
other supplies the energy and the principles which already once, between
the Seven Years' War and the assembly of the States General, saved
human progress in face of the political fatuity of England and the
political nullity of France; and they are now, amid the distraction of
the various representatives of an obsolete ordering, the only forces to
be trusted at once for multiplying the achievements of human
intelligence stimulated by human sympathy, and for diffusing their
beneficent results with an ampler hand and more far-scattering arm.
Faith in a divine power, devout obedience to its supposed will, hope of
ecstatic, unspeakable reward, these were the springs of the old
movement. Undivided love of our fellows, steadfast faith in human
nature, steadfast search after justice, firm aspiration towards
improvement, and generous contentment in the hope that others may reap
whatever reward may be, these are the springs of the new.

There is no given set of practical maxims agreed to by all members of
the revolutionary schools for achieving the work of release from the
pressure of an antiquated social condition, any more than there is one
set of doctrines and one kind of discipline accepted by all Protestants.
Voltaire was a revolutionist in one sense, Diderot in another, and
Rousseau in a third, just as in the practical order, Lafayette, Danton,
Robespierre, represented three different aspirations and as many
methods. Rousseau was the most directly revolutionary of all the