Within the walls of Parliament however Burke as yet stood utterly alone. His "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs," in June 1791, failed to detach a follower from Fox; while Pitt coldly counselled him rather to praise the English Constitution than to rail at the French. "I have made many enemies and few friends," Burke wrote sadly to the French princes who had fled from their country and were gathering in arms at Coblentz, "by the part I have taken." But the opinion of the people was slowly drifting to his side; and a sale of thirty thousand copies showed that the "Reflections" echoed the general sentiment of Englishmen. At this moment indeed the mood of England was singularly unfavourable to any fair appreciation of the Revolution across the Channel. Her temper was above all industrial. Men who were working hard and fast growing rich, who had the narrow and practical turn of men of business, looked angrily at this sudden disturbance of order, this restless and vague activity, these rhetorical appeals to human feeling, these abstract and often empty theories. In England it was a time of political content and social well-being, of steady economic progress, as well as of a powerful religious revival; and an insular lack of imaginative interest in other races hindered men from seeing that every element of this content, of this order, of this peaceful and harmonious progress, of this reconciliation of society and religion, was wanting abroad. The sympathy which the first outbreak of the Revolution had roused among Englishmen grew cooler in fact with every step which the Revolution took. While the Declaration of the Rights of Man roused France to a frenzy of enthusiasm, it was set aside as a dream by the practical islanders who based their rights on precedent and not on theory. The abolition of all social privileges on the 12th of August, the most characteristic step in the French Revolution, was met with grave disapproval by a people more alien from social equality than any people in Europe. Every incident in the struggle between the French people and their king widened the breach of feeling. The anarchy of the country, the want of political sense in its Assembly, the paltry declamation of its clubs, the exaggerated sentiment, the universal suspicion, the suspension of every security for personal freedom, the arrests, the murders, the overthrow of the Church, the ruin of the Crown, were watched with an ever-growing severity by a nation whose chief instinct was one of order, whose bent was to practical politics, whose temper was sober and trustful, whose passionate love of personal liberty was only equalled by its passionate abhorrence of bloodshed in civil strife, and whose ecclesiastical and political institutions were newly endeared to it by a fresh revival of religious feeling, and by the constitutional attitude of its Government for a hundred years.

The coalition against France.

Sympathy in fact was soon limited to a few groups of reformers who gathered in "Constitutional Clubs," and whose reckless language quickened the national reaction. But in spite of Burke's appeals and the cries of the nobles who had fled from France and longed only to march against their country, Europe held back from any attack on the Revolution, and Pitt preserved his attitude of neutrality, though with a greater appearance of reserve. So anxious, in fact, did the aspect of affairs in the East make him for the restoration of tranquillity in France, that he foiled a plan which its emigrant nobles had formed for a descent on the French coast, and declared formally at Vienna that England would remain absolutely neutral should hostilities arise between France and the Emperor. But the Emperor was as anxious to avoid a French war as Pitt himself. Though Catharine, now her strife with Turkey was over, wished to plunge the two German powers into a struggle with the Revolution which would leave her free to annex Poland single-handed, neither Leopold nor Prussia would tie their hands by such a contest. The flight of Lewis the Sixteenth from Paris in June 1791 brought Europe for a moment to the verge of war; but he was intercepted and brought back: and for a while the danger seemed to incline the revolutionists in France to greater moderation. Lewis too not only accepted the Constitution, but pleaded earnestly with the Emperor against any armed intervention as certain to bring ruin to his throne. In their conference at Pillnitz therefore, in August, Leopold and the king of Prussia contented themselves with a vague declaration inviting the European powers to co-operate in restoring a sound form of government in France, availed themselves of England's neutrality to refuse all military aid to the French princes, and dealt simply with the affairs of Poland. But the peace they desired soon became impossible. The Constitutional Royalists in France availed themselves of the irritation caused by the Declaration of Pillnitz to revive the cry for a war which, as they hoped, would give strength to the throne. The more violent revolutionists, or Jacobins, on the other hand, abandoned their advocacy of peace. Under the influence of the "Girondists," the deputies from the south of France, whose aim was a republic, and who saw in a great national struggle a means of overthrowing the monarchy, they decided, in spite of the opposition of their leader, Robespierre, on a contest with the Emperor. Both parties united to demand the breaking up of an army which the emigrant princes had formed on the Rhine; and though Leopold before his death assented to this demand, France declared war against his successor, Francis, in April 1792.

England and the Revolutionists.

That the war with Germany would widen into a vast European struggle, a struggle in which the peoples would rise against their oppressors, and the freedom which France had won diffuse itself over the world, no French revolutionist doubted for an hour. Nor did they doubt that in this struggle England would join them. It was from England that they had drawn those principles of political and social liberty which they believed themselves to be putting into practice. It was to England that they looked above all for approbation and sympathy, and on the aid of England that they confidently counted in their struggle with a despotic and priest-ridden Europe. Absorbed in the mighty events about them, and utterly ignorant of the real set of English feeling or the real meaning of Pitt's policy, they were astonished and indignant at his firm refusal of their alliance and his resolve to stand apart from the struggle. It was in vain that Pitt strove to allay this irritation by demanding only that Holland should remain untouched, and promising neutrality even though Belgium should be occupied by a French army, or that he strengthened these pledges by a reduction of military forces, and by bringing forward in 1792 a peace-budget which rested on a large remission of taxation. To the revolutionists at Paris the attitude of England remained unintelligible and irritating. Instead of the aid they had counted on, they found but a cold neutrality. In place of the sympathy on which they reckoned, they saw, now that they looked coolly across the Channel, a reserve passing into disapproval. The pen of Burke was denouncing the Revolution as the very negation of those principles on which English liberty rested. The priests and nobles who had fled from the new France were finding pity and welcome on English shores. And now that France flung herself on an armed Europe to win freedom for its peoples from their kings, England stood coldly apart. To men frenzied with a passionate enthusiasm, and frenzied yet more with a sudden terror at the dangers they were encountering, such an attitude of neutrality in such a quarter seemed like a stab in the back.

Their efforts in England.