Of the men who, in every corner of old Europe, felt themselves thus moved by the deeds of a small community in the New World, not one thoroughly understood the deep and secret cause of his own emotion, yet all heard a signal in that distant sound. What it announced was still unknown. It was the voice of John crying in the wilderness that new times were at hand. Seek not to assign to these facts which I have been relating any peculiar cause: all of them were different symptoms of the same social disease. On all hands the old institutions and the old powers no longer fitted accurately the new condition and the new wants of man. Hence that strange unrest which led even the great and the worldly to regard their own state of life as intolerable. Hence that universal thirst for change, which came unbidden to every mind, though no one knew as yet how that change could be brought about. An internal and spontaneous impulse seemed to shake at once the whole fabric of society, and disturbed to their foundations the ideas and habits of every man. To hold back was felt to be impossible: yet none knew on which side they would incline; and the whole of Europe was in the condition of a huge mass which oscillates before it falls. FOOTNOTES: [85] ‘Correspondence of George Forster,’ i. 257. [86] _Idem_, ii. 286. [87] See ‘Waldemar’: a philosophical novel, by Jacobi, written in 1779. Notwithstanding its defects, which are immense, this book made a great impression, because these defects were those of the age. [88] The word in the French text is _confiance_--‘l’image de la _confiance_ et de la mort.’ But this expression appears to me unintelligible, and the word has probably been wrongly printed or wrongly transcribed. M. de Tocqueville’s handwriting was singularly illegible, and these detached notes were written in characters which he was himself not always able to read. The passage here cited is from Vandelbourg’s French translation of Jacobi’s ‘Waldemar,’ where it might be verified (Tom. i. p. 154.)--H. R. [89] Letter of Johann Müller to Baron de Salis, August 6th, 1789. [90] Fox to Mr. Fitzpatrick, July 30th, 1789. (‘Memorials and Correspondence of Fox,’ ii. 361.) [91] Life of Perthes, p. 177; and of Stolberg, p. 179--in same book. [92] Not a man of education, of whatever rank, would pass through the town where Forster lived without coming to converse with him. Princes invited him, nobles courted him, the commonalty thronged about him, the learned were intensely interested by his conversation. To Michaelis, Heyne, Herder, and others who were endeavouring to solve the mystery of the antiquity and history of mankind, Forster seemed to open the sources of the primæval world by describing those populations of another hemisphere which had not come in contact with any form of civilisation. [93] See for these details Schlosser’s ‘History of the Eighteenth Century,’ and Forster’s Correspondence.