Europe, and I am encouraging it by all the means in my power." Paine
was in Paris when the Bastille was taken. Lafayette placed the key in
his hands, to be transmitted to Washington. Paine wrote to the
President, "That the principles of America opened the Bastille is not
to be doubted, and therefore the key comes to the right place."
Washington, returning his thanks to Paine for the key, added,--"It will
give you pleasure to learn that the new government answers its purposes
as well as could have been reasonably expected." Yes! and still answers
reasonable purposes to this day. In the mean while dozens of French
constitutions, "perfections of human wisdom," have been invented, set
up, and crushed to atoms.

It was a time of revival in politics. Holland was indulging in hope,
Germany was anxious, and steady old England began to lend an ear to the
new doctrines from the other side of the Channel. The tendency of the
human mind to believe in a golden future, until knowledge of the world
and reflection teach us that these bright visions always shrink into
the ordinary dimensions of the present as they approach it, misled
enthusiastic Englishmen, many of them of a high order of intelligence.
There was something grand in the idea, that the prejudices and the
abuses of twenty centuries had been buried forever in the ruins of the
old French monarchy. This was not enough. All governments and all
prejudices of society were to be thrown into the melting-pot; out of
the fusion was to arise the new era, the millennium. All other evil
things would cease to exist, as well as monopolies, titles, places, and
pensions. Sickness, even death, perhaps, might be evaded by the skill
of a new science. Who could tell? Franklin had suggested this, half in
jest, years before; Condorcet believed and asserted it now. Ignorance
and misery, at all events, should come to an end. When kings and a
wicked self-seeking aristocracy should be swept away, the divine sense