The French Revolution was an attempt to establish in the public law of Europe maxims which had triumphed by the aid of France in America. By the principles of the Declaration of Independence a government which obstructs liberty forfeits the claim to obedience, and the men who devote their families to ruin and themselves to death in order to destroy it do no more than their duty. The American Revolution was not provoked by tyranny or intolerable wrong, for the Colonies were better off than the nations of Europe. They rose in arms against a constructive danger, an evil that might have been borne but for its possible effects. The precept which condemned George III. was fatal to Lewis XVI., and the case for the French Revolution was stronger than the case for the American Revolution. But it involved international consequences. It condemned the governments of other countries. If the revolutionary government was legitimate, the conservative governments were not. They necessarily threatened each other. By the law of its existence, France encouraged insurrection against its neighbours, and the existing balance of power would have to be redressed in obedience to a higher law. The successful convulsion in France led to a convulsion in Europe; and the Convention which, in the first illusions of victory, promised brotherhood to populations striking for freedom, was impolitic, but was not illogical. In truth the Jacobins only transplanted for the use of oppressed Europeans a precedent created by the Monarchy in favour of Americans who were not oppressed. Nobody imagined that the new system of international relations could be carried into effect without resistance or sacrifice, but the enthusiasts of liberty, true or false, might well account it worth all that it must cost, even if the price was to be twenty years of war. This new dogma is the real cause of the breach with England, which did such harm to France. Intelligent Jacobins, like Danton and Carnot, saw the danger of abandoning policy for the sake of principle. They strove to interpret the menacing declaration, until it became innocuous, and they put forward the natural frontier in its stead. But it was the very essence of the revolutionary spirit, and could not be denied.