But the Batavians and the peoples of the Netherlands generally, where the Batavians settled, were very different from the French. Doubtless there was an increasing blend of Latin as the invaders went south, but an adequate reason for their difference is hard to find. [Sidenote: The French character] At all events what we can say confidently is that the French developed, and still express, a national character of their own which is distinct from that of the others that broke through the bounds. It is also different from that of those German peoples who did not break through, who remained east of the Roman Empire's palisades. One distinguishing characteristic of the French is that they are very "quick at the uptake," as we say: their minds respond quickly to suggestion, and they act quickly on the ideas thus quickly grasped. Thinking and acting more quickly than, say, Britons or Germans, they also set a much higher value on presenting to themselves a clear reason for any action that they undertake. The Briton, and in less degree the German, is tolerably well content to do the act which appears likely to give the best result, without troubling himself much as to what account he would give of the action if he were required to explain just {156} why, in accordance with what law of right reason, he so acted. The French mind is not at ease unless it can refer an act back to some such reason as its motive. And one of the tendencies of that disposition of mind is that, if the French once perceive a reason of this kind clearly, they act according to it and are very readily obedient to its prompting. So it was that when the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote about Egalité, Fraternité, and Liberté, with the idea that all men were created equal (and therefore ought to be equal always), that all men ought to live in brotherly love, and that all men should be free, these ideas won an immediate influence over the minds of Frenchmen that they would not have exercised over the minds of Britons or Germans. No doubt they are pleasant ideas, and would be very welcome, if they could be practically realised, to all reasonable men of any country; but on the French their effect was such that the nation at once had an eager desire to act on them. Frenchmen deemed that they might bring about the millennium, or a heaven on earth, by striving for their realisation. Rousseau, then, and other writers inspired with his sentiments, prepared the minds of men in France for revolution. Many, with an ardour for freedom from the hard conditions which bound them, went as volunteers to help the Americans fighting against England. Those who returned came back with their ardour further kindled.