It was a time of revival in politics. Holland was indulging in hope, Germany was anxious, and steady old England began to lend an ear to the new doctrines from the other side of the Channel. The tendency of the human mind to believe in a golden future, until knowledge of the world and reflection teach us that these bright visions always shrink into the ordinary dimensions of the present as they approach it, misled enthusiastic Englishmen, many of them of a high order of intelligence. There was something grand in the idea, that the prejudices and the abuses of twenty centuries had been buried forever in the ruins of the old French monarchy. This was not enough. All governments and all prejudices of society were to be thrown into the melting-pot; out of the fusion was to arise the new era, the millennium. All other evil things would cease to exist, as well as monopolies, titles, places, and pensions. Sickness, even death, perhaps, might be evaded by the skill of a new science. Who could tell? Franklin had suggested this, half in jest, years before; Condorcet believed and asserted it now. Ignorance and misery, at all events, should come to an end. When kings and a wicked self-seeking aristocracy should be swept away, the divine sense of right, which God had implanted in the people, would rule; there could be no wars; armies and fleets would become useless; taxes would amount to nothing. All the nations would form one grand republic, with a universal convention sitting at the world's centre, to watch over the rights of man! Liberty, virtue, happiness, seemed ready to descend upon the earth. "Jam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto, Ac toto surget gens aurea mundo." As each week brought the news of some stupendous change, a kind of madness seized upon the minds of men. Fanatics were jubilant. "Revolutions," they said, "can do no wrong; all are for the best." Englishmen, hitherto sane, forgot their nationality, and became violent Frenchmen. So strongly did the current set in this direction, that the massacres of September, the execution of the King, the despotism of the Directory and the Consulship could not turn it, until Napoleon united all France under him and all England against him. As late as 1793, such men as James Watt, Jr., and the poet Wordsworth were in Paris, on intimate terms with Robespierre and his Committee.