Her soldiers bore with them the new doctrines, while far
beyond the utmost reach of her armies flew the ideas engendered in
the fevered air of Paris. Wherever they alighted they touched men and
stung them to madness, and the madness that they bred was not confined
to those who believed the new gospel, but was shared equally by those
who resisted and loathed it. Burke, in his way, was as much crazed as
Camille Desmoulins, and it seemed impossible for people living in the
midst of that terrific convulsion of society to retain their judgment.
Nowhere ought men to have been better able to withstand the contagion
of the revolution than in America, and yet even here it produced the
same results as in countries nearly affected by it. The party
of opposition to the government became first ludicrous and then
dangerous, in their wild admiration and senseless imitation of ideas
and practices as utterly alien to the people of the United States as
cannibalism or fire-worship. Then the Federalists, on their side, fell
beneath the spell. The overthrow of religion, society, property, and
morals, which they beheld in Paris, seemed to them to be threatening
their own country, and they became as extreme as their opponents in
the exactly opposite direction. Federalist divines came to look
upon Jefferson, the most timid and prudent of men, as a Marat or
Robespierre, ready to reproduce the excesses of his prototypes; while
Pickering, Wolcott, and all their friends in public life regarded
themselves as engaged in a struggle for the preservation of order and
society and of all that they held most dear.
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