Such assurances were inaccurate and misleading. There was one man in England the goodness of whose heart, the wisdom of whose brain could scarcely be questioned, whose censure in England, and not in England alone, was more serious than the applause of a whole theatre of others. At a moment when all who represented liberal thought in politics, all who some ten years earlier had sympathized with the American colonists, were showing a like sympathy for the insurgent people of France, Edmund Burke made himself conspicuous by the vehemence and the vigor of his opposition to a movement which commanded the admiration of his most intimate friends and closest political allies. While the Revolution was still almost in its infancy, while Sheridan and Fox vied with each other in the warmth of their applause, Burke set himself to preach a crusade against the Revolution with all the unrestrained ardor of his uncompromising nature. No words of Fox or of Sheridan, no resolution of clubs, no delegated enthusiasm had anything like the same effect in aiding, that Burke's famous pamphlet had in injuring the French Revolution, in the eyes not merely of the mass of the English people, but in the eyes of a very great number of people in the countries of Europe. People whose business it was to be king, to use the famous phrase of a then reigning prince, readily welcomed Burke's "Reflexions on the French Revolution," which was soon disseminated all over the Continent in a French translation. Naturally enough it appealed to the Emperor of Germany, to the Empress Catherine of Russia, to the French princes sheltering in Coblentz and boasting of the revenge they would take on the Revolution when the King should enjoy his own again. Naturally enough it appealed to George the Third as a book which every gentleman ought to read. Kings and princes everywhere, who felt that at any moment their own thrones might begin to rock unsteadily beneath them, inevitably applauded the unexpected assistance of the greatest orator and thinker of his age. {297}