A naive confidence that the political upheaval meant regeneration and inaugurated a reign of justice and happiness pervaded France in the first period of the Revolution, and found a striking expression in the ceremonies of the universal "Federation" in the Champ-de-Mars on 14th July 1790. The festival was theatrical enough, decreed and arranged by the Constituent Assembly, but the enthusiasm and optimism of the people who gathered to swear loyalty to the new Constitution were genuine and spontaneous. Consciously or subconsciously they were under the influence of the doctrine of Progress which leaders of opinion had for several decades been insinuating into the public mind. It did not occur to them that their oaths and fraternal embraces did not change their minds or hearts, and that, as Taine remarked, they remained what ages of political subjection and one age of political literature had made them. The assumption that new social machinery could alter human nature and create a heaven upon earth was to be swiftly and terribly confuted. Post uarios casus et tot discrimina rerum uenimus in Latium, but Latium was to be the scene of sanguinary struggles. Another allied and fundamental fallacy, into which all the philosophers and Rousseau had more or less fallen, was reflected and exposed by the Revolution. They had considered man in vacuo. They had not seen that the whole development of a society is an enormous force which cannot be talked or legislated away; they had ignored the power of social memory and historical traditions, and misvalued the strength of the links which bind generations together. So the Revolutionaries imagined that they could break abruptly with the past, and that a new method of government, constructed on mathematical lines, a constitution (to use words of Burke) "ready made and ready armed, mature in its birth, a perfect goddess of wisdom and of war, hammered by our blacksmith midwives out of the brain of Jupiter himself," would create a condition of idyllic felicity in France, and that the arrival of the millennium depended only on the adoption of the same principles by other nations. The illusions created by the Declaration of the Rights of Man on the 4th of August died slowly under the shadow of the Terror; but though the hopes of those who believed in the speedy regeneration of the world were belied, some of the thoughtful did not lose heart. There was one at least who did not waver in his faith that the movement was a giant's step on the path of man towards ultimate felicity, however far he had still to travel. Condorcet, one of the younger Encyclopaedists, spent the last months of his life, under the menace of the guillotine, in projecting a history of human Progress. 3.