Grimm, xiii. 517. La Harpe, _Corresp. litt._ iv. 227.] As the people of Paris liked violent language, they also enjoyed opposition to the government, whatever form that opposition might assume. The Parliament, as we have seen, although contending for privileges and against measures beneficial to most people in the country, was yet popular, for it was continually defying the court. But many privileged persons went farther than the conservative lawyers of the city. It was indeed such people who took the lead both in proclaiming equality and in denouncing courtiers. From the nobility and the rich citizens of Paris, discontent with existing conditions and the habit of opposition to constituted authorities spread to the lower classes and to the inhabitants of provincial towns. Louis XVI. had not been long on the throne when a series of events occurred in a distant part of the world which excited in a high degree both the spirit of insubordination and the love of equality in French minds. The American colonies of Great Britain broke into open revolt, and presently declared their independence of the mother country. The sympathy of Frenchmen was almost universal and was loudly expressed. Here was a nation of farmers constituting little communities that Rousseau might not have disowned, at least if he had looked at them no nearer than across the ocean. They were in arms for their rights and liberties, and in revolt against arbitrary power. And the oppressor was the king of England, the monarch of the nation that had inflicted on France, only a few years before, a humiliating defeat. Much that was generous in French character, and much that was sentimental, love of liberty, admiration of equality, hatred of the hereditary enemy, conspired to favor the cause of the "Insurgents." The people who wished for political reforms could point to the model commonwealths of the New World. Their constitutions were translated into French, and several editions were sold in Paris.[Footnote: _Recueil des loix constitutives. Constitutions des treize États Unis de l'Amérique_. Franklin to Samuel Cooper, May 1, 1777. _Works_ vi. 96.] The people that adored King Louis could cry out for the abasement of King George. A few prudent heads in high places were shaken at the thought of assisting rebellion. The Emperor Joseph II., brother-in-law to the king of France, was not quite the only man whose business it was to be a royalist. Ministers might deprecate war on economical grounds, and advise that just enough help be given to the Americans to prolong their struggle with England until both parties should be exhausted. But the heart of the French nation had gone into the war. It was for the sake of his own country that the Count of Vergennes, the foreign minister of Louis XVI., induced her to take up arms against Great Britain, and in the negotiations for peace he would willingly have sacrificed the interests of his American to those of his Spanish