Condorcet's peculiarities of political antipathy and preference can hardly be better illustrated than by his view of the two great revolutions in English history. The first was religious, and therefore he hated it; the second was accompanied by much argument, and had no religion about it, and therefore he extolled it. It is scientific knowledge, he said, which explains why efforts after liberty in unenlightened centuries are so fleeting, and so deeply stained by bloodshed. 'Compare these with the happy efforts of America and France; observe even in the same century, but at different epochs, the two revolutions of England fanatical and England enlightened. We see on the one side contemporaries of Prynne and Knox, while crying out that they are fighting for heaven and liberty, cover their unhappy country with blood in order to cement the tyranny of the hypocrite Cromwell; on the other, the contemporaries of Boyle and Newton establish with pacific wisdom the freest constitution in the world.'[11] It is not wonderful that his own revolution was misunderstood by one who thus loved English Whigs, but hated English Republicans; who could forgive an aristocratic faction grasping power for their order, but who could not sympathise with a nation rising and smiting its oppressor, where they smote in the name of the Lord and of Gideon, nor with a ruler who used his power with noble simplicity in the interests of his people, and established in the heart of the nation a respect for itself such as she has never known since, simply because this ruler knew nothing about _principes_ or the Rights of Man. However, Nemesis comes. By and by Condorcet found himself writing a piece to show that our Revolution of 1688 was very inferior in lawfulness to the French Revolution of the Tenth of August.[12] FOOTNOTES: [1] _Œuv. de Condorcet_ (12 vols. 1847-49), ix. 489. [2] _Ib._ i. 220. [3] _Œuv._ i. 201. See Turgot's wise reply, p. 202. [4] Sept. 1770. Voltaire's _Corr._ vol. lxxi. p. 147. [5] _Œuv._ i. 41. [6] _Œuv. de Turgot_, ii. 817. [7] _Œuv._ i. 228. [8] _Ib._ i. 232. [9] _Œuv._ i. 29. [10] Letters to Condorcet (1774). _Œuv._ i. 35. [11] _Éloge de Franklin_, iii. 422. [12] _Réflexions sur la Rév. de 1688, et sur celle du 10 Août_, xii. 197. II.