The people in Germany too little understood the real motives and object of the French Revolution, and were too soon provoked by the predatory incursions of the French troops, to be infected with revolutionary principles. These merely fermented among the literati; the Utopian idea of universal fraternization was spread by Freemasonry; numbers at first cherished a hope that the Revolution would preserve a pure moral character, and were not a little astonished on beholding the monstrous crimes to which it gave birth. Others merely rejoiced at the fall of the old and insupportable system, and numerous anonymous pamphlets in this spirit appeared in the Rhenish provinces. Fichte, the philosopher, also published an anonymous work in favor of the Revolution. Others again, as, for instance, Reichard, Girtanner, Schirach, and Hoffmann, set themselves up as informers, and denounced every liberal-minded man to the princes as a dangerous Jacobin. A search was made for Crypto-Jacobins, and every honest man was exposed to the calumny of the servile newspaper editors. French republicanism was denounced as criminal, notwithstanding the favor in which the French language and French ideas were held at all the courts of Germany. Liberal opinions were denounced as criminal, notwithstanding the example first set by the courts in ridiculing religion, in mocking all that was venerable and sacred. Nor was this reaction by any means occasioned by a burst of German patriotism against the tyranny of France, for the treaty of Basel speedily reconciled the self-same newspaper editors with France. It was mere servility; and the hatred which, it may easily be conceived, was naturally excited against the French as a nation, was vented in this mode upon the patient Germans,[16] who were, unfortunately, ever doomed, whenever their neighbors were visited with some political chronic convulsion, to taste the bitter remedy. But few of the writers of the day took a historical view of the Revolution and weighed its irremediable results in regard to Germany, besides Gentz, Rehberg, and the Baron von Gagern, who published an "Address to his Countrymen," in which he started the painful question, "Why are we Germans disunited?" The whole of these contending opinions of the learned were, however, equally erroneous. It was as little possible to preserve the Revolution from blood and immorality, and to extend the boon of liberty to the whole world, as it was to suppress it by force, and, as far as Germany was concerned, her affairs were too complicated and her interests too scattered for any attempt of the kind to succeed. A Doctor Faust, at Buckeburg, sent a learned treatise upon the origin of trousers to the national convention at Paris, by which Sansculottism had been introduced; an incident alone sufficient to show the state of feeling in Germany at that time.