"Jam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto, Ac toto surget gens aurea mundo."
As each week brought the news of some stupendous change, a kind of madness seized upon the minds of men. Fanatics were jubilant. "Revolutions," they said, "can do no wrong; all are for the best." Englishmen, hitherto sane, forgot their nationality, and became violent Frenchmen. So strongly did the current set in this direction, that the massacres of September, the execution of the King, the despotism of the Directory and the Consulship could not turn it, until Napoleon united all France under him and all England against him. As late as 1793, such men as James Watt, Jr., and the poet Wordsworth were in Paris, on intimate terms with Robespierre and his Committee.
Before 1789, there was no particular discontent in England. Some talk there had been of reform in the representation, and the usual complaints of the burden of taxation. The Dissenters had been trying to get the Corporation and Test Acts repealed, without much success. But nothing beyond occasional meetings and petitions to Parliament would have occurred, had it not been for the explosion in France, then, as since, the political powder-magazine of Europe. The Whig party had seen with pleasure the beginning of the French reforms. Paine, who had partaken of Mr. Burke's hospitality at Beaconsfield, wrote to him freely from Paris, assuring him that everything was going on right; that little inconveniences, the necessary consequences of pulling down and building up, might arise; but that these were much less than ought to be expected; and that a national convention in England would be the best plan of regenerating the nation. Christie, a foolish Scotchman, and Baron Clootz (soon to become Anacharsis) also wrote to Burke in the same vein. Their communications affected his mind in a way they little expected. Mr. Burke had lost all faith in any good result from the blind, headlong rush of the Revolution, and was appalled at the toleration, or rather, sympathy, shown in England, for the riots, outrages, and murders of the Parisian rabble. He began writing the "Reflections," as a warning to his countrymen. He was led to enlarge the work by some remarks made by Fox and Sheridan in the House of Commons; and more particularly by some passages in a sermon preached at the Old Jewry by Dr. Price. Eleven years before, this scientific divine, by a resolution of the American Congress, had been invited to consider himself an American citizen, and to furnish the rebellious Colonists with his assistance in regulating their finances. He had disregarded this flattering summons. Full of zeal for "humanity," he eagerly accepted the request of the Revolution Society to deliver their anniversary sermon. In this discourse, the Doctor, the fervor of whose sentiments had increased with age, maintained the right of the nation "to cashier the king," choose a new ruler, and frame a government for itself. The sermon and the congratulatory addresses it provoked were published by the society and industriously circulated.