But it is the greatest proof of human weakness that there is no movement however beneficent, no doctrine however sound, no truth however absolute, but that it can be speciously so extended, so expanded, so emphasized as to lose its identity. Coincident with the political speculation of the eighteenth century appeared the storm and stress of romanticism and sentimentalism. The extremes of morbid personal emotion were thought serviceable for daily life, while the middle course of applying ideals to experience was utterly abandoned. The latest nihilism differs little from the conception of the perfect regeneration of mankind by discarding the old merely because it was old which triumphed in the latter half of the eighteenth century among philosophers and wits. To be sure, they had a substitute for whatever was abolished and a supplement for whatever was left incomplete. Even the stable sense of the Americans was infected by the virus of mere theories. In obedience to the spirit of the age they introduced into their written constitution, which was in the main but a statement of their deep-seated political habits, a scheme like that of the electoral college founded on some high-sounding doctrine, or omitted from it in obedience to a prevalent and temporary extravagance of protest some fundamental truth like that of the Christian character of their government and laws. If there be anywhere a Christian Protestant state it is the United States; if any futile invention were ever incorporated in a written charter it was that of the electoral college. The addition of a vague theory or the omission of essential national qualities in the document of the constitution has affected our subsequent history little or not at all. But such was not the case in a society still under feudal oppression. Fictions like the contract theory of government, exploded by the sound sense of Burke; political generalizations like certain paragraphs of the French Declaration of Rights, every item of which now and here reads like a platitude but was then and there a vivid revolutionary novelty; emotional yearnings for some vague Utopia--all fell into fruitful soil and produced a rank harvest, mostly of straw and stalks, although there was some sound grain. The thought of the time was a powerful factor in determining the course and the quality of events throughout all Europe. No nation was altogether unmoved. The center of agitation was in France, although the little Calvinistic state of Geneva brought forth the prophet and writer of the times.