‘What scenes are passing in France!’ writes Johann Müller on the 6th of August, 1789.[89] ‘Blessed be the impression they produce on the nations and on their masters! I know there are excesses, but the cost of a free constitution is not too great. Is not a storm which purifies the air better than an atmosphere tainted as with the plague, even though here and there it should strike a few heads?’ ‘What an event,’ exclaimed Fox, ‘how much the greatest it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the best!’[90] Can we be surprised that this conception of the Revolution as a general uprising of humanity, a conception which enlarged and invigorated so many small and feeble souls, should have taken possession at once of the mind of France, when even other countries partook of it? Nor is it astonishing that the first excesses of the Revolution should have affected the best patriots of France so little, when even foreigners who were not excited by the struggle or embittered by personal grievances could extend so much indulgence to them. Let it not be supposed that this sort of abhorrence of themselves and of their age, which had thus strangely fallen upon almost all the inhabitants of the continent of Europe, was a superficial or a transient sentiment. Ten years later, when the French Revolution had inflicted on Germany all sorts of violent transformations accompanied by death and destruction, even then, one of those Germans, in whom enthusiasm for France had turned to bitter hatred, exclaims, mindful of the past, in a confidential effusion, ‘What was is no more. What new edifice will be raised on the ruins, I know not. But this I know, that it would be the direst calamity if this tremendous era were again to give birth to the apathy and the worn-out forms of the past.’ ‘Yes,’ replied the person to whom these words were addressed, ‘the old social body must perish.’[91]