Above all, Pitt and Grenville believed the French Government to be incompetent as well as exasperatingly cruel. In their eyes Jacobins were sworn foes to all that made government possible. The mistake was natural. The English Ministers knew little of what was going on in France, and therefore failed to understand that the desperadoes now in power at Paris were wielding a centralized despotism, compared with which that of Louis XIV was child's play. As to the Phoenix-like survival of French credit, it is inexplicable even to those who have witnessed the wonders wrought by Thiers in 1870-3. All that can be said is that the Jacobins killed the goose that laid the golden egg, and yet the golden eggs were laid. Let him who understands the miracle of revolutionary finance cast the first stone at Pitt. The Prime Minister also erred when he believed the French social structure to be breaking up. Here again the miscalculation was perfectly natural in an age which regarded kings, nobles, and bishops as the fixed stars of a universe otherwise diversified only by a dim Milky Way. The French were the first to dispel these notions. In truth the strength of the young giant bore witness to the potency of the new and as yet allied forces--Democracy and Nationality. In 1792 Democracy girded itself eagerly against the semi-feudal Powers, Austria and Prussia; but the strength latent in the French people appeared only in the next year when, on the accession of England, Spain, and the Empire to the Coalition, plans were discussed of detaching Alsace, Lorraine, Roussillon, and Flanders.[337] To these sacrilegious schemes the French patriots opposed the dogma of Rousseau--the indivisibility of the general will. "Perish 25,000,000 Frenchmen rather than the Republic one and indivisible." This perfervid, if illogical, exclamation of a Commissioner of the Convention reveals something of that passion for unity which now fused together the French nation. Some peoples merge themselves slowly together under the shelter of kindred beliefs and institutions. Others again, after feeling their way towards closer union, finally achieve it in the explosion of war or revolution. The former case was the happy lot of the British nation; the latter, that of the French. Pitt, with his essentially English outlook, failed to perceive that the diverse peoples grouped together under the French monarchy had now attained to an indissoluble unity under the stress of the very blows which he and his Allies dealt in Flanders, Alsace, and Provence.