vehement, uncompromising spirit of their rivals, the so-called party of the
Mountain, quickly made itself felt in all the relations of France to
foreign Powers. The intention of conquest might still be disavowed, as it
had been five months before; but were the converts to liberty to be denied
the right of uniting themselves to the French people by their own free
will? When the armies of the Republic had swept its assailants from the
border-provinces that gave them entrance into France, were those provinces
to be handed back to a government of priests and nobles? The scruples which
had condemned all annexation of territory vanished in that orgy of
patriotism which followed the expulsion of the invader and the discovery
that the Revolution was already a power in other lands than France. The
nation that had to fight the battle of European freedom must appeal to the
spirit of freedom wherever it would answer the call: the conflict with
sovereigns must be maintained by arming their subjects against them in
every land. In this conception of the universal alliance of the nations,
the Governments with which France was not yet at war were scarcely
distinguished from those which had pronounced against her. The
frontier-lines traced by an obsolete diplomacy, the artificial guarantees
of treaties, were of little account against the living and inalienable
sovereignty of the people. To men inflamed with the passions of 1792 an
argument of international law scarcely conveyed more meaning than to Peter
the Hermit. Among the statesmen of other lands, who had no intention of
abandoning all the principles recognised as the public right of Europe, the
language now used by France could only be understood as the avowal of
indiscriminate aggression.

[The neighbors of France.]

The Revolution had displayed itself in France as a force of union as well
as of division. It had driven the nobles across the frontier; it had torn