The story of that time is now like a photographic negative, which a man fixes, washing away the white cloud from the clean detail of the film. Point after point, then more rapidly whole spaces, stand out precise and true. And the certitude which he feels that the underlying picture is an accurate reminiscence of Nature comes to us also when we make out and fix some passage in the Revolution, cleared of its mass of hearsay, of vituperation, of ignorance, and of mere sound. We are beginning to see a great picture, consonant in its details, and consecutive in its action. The necessity of reform; the light of the ideal striking men’s minds after a long sleep, the hills first and afterwards the plains; privilege and all the interests of the few alarmed and militant; the menace of attack and the preparation of defence; the opposition of extremes on either side of the frontier, growing at an increasing speed, till at last, each opposite principle mutually exciting the other, as armatories their magnets, from a little current of opinion rose a force that none could resist. The governments of the whole world were for the destruction of the French people, and the French people were for the rooting out of everything, good and evil, which was attached, however faintly, to the old regime. The rhetoricians passed in the smoke of the fire, unsubstantial, full of words that could lead and inspire, but empty of acts that could govern the storm. From their passing, which is as vague as a vision, we hear faintly the “Marseillaise” of the Girondins. The men of action and of the crisis passed. They burnt in the heat they themselves had kindled, but in that furnace the nation was run, and forged, and made. Then came the armies: France grown cold from the casting-pit, but bent upon action, and able to do. Wherever France went by, the Revolutionary Thing remained the legacy of her conviction and of her power. It remains with a kind of iron laughter for those who judge the idea as a passing madness. The philosophers have decided upon a new philosophy; the lawyers have clearly proved that there has been no change; the rhetoric has been thoroughly laughed down, enthusiasm has grown ridiculous, and the men of action are cursed. But in the wake of the French march citizens are found who own the soil and are judged by an equal code of laws; nationalities have been welded, patriotism has risen at the call of the new patriotic creed; Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Italy have known themselves as something more than the delimitations of sovereigns. Nor was there any abomination of the old decay, its tortures, its ignominies, its privileges, its licensed insults, or its slaveries, but she utterly stamped them out. In Germany, in Austria, in Italy, they disappeared. Only in one dark corner they remained—the great Northern field, where France herself grew powerless from cold, and from whence an unknown rule and the advance of relentless things menaces Europe now.