At the first outbreak of this revolution, the privileged classes of other countries, upholding crumbling institutions and rotten dynasties, rushed forth against the maddened hordes of French democracy.

The popular power, springing upward by its own elasticity when the weight of political oppression was removed, soon became too wild and reckless to establish itself on any sure basis, or even to provide for its own protection.

If the attacks of the enervated enemies of France were weak, so also were her own efforts feeble to resist these attacks.

The republican armies repelled the ill-planned and ill-conducted invasion by the Duke of Brunswick; but it was by the substitution of human life for preparation, system, and skill; enthusiasm supplied the place of discipline; robbery produced military stores; and the dead bodies of her citizens formed _epaulements_ against the enemy.

Yet this was but the strength of weakness; the aimless struggle of a broken and disjointed government; and the new revolutionary power was fast sinking away before the combined opposition of Europe, when the great genius of Napoleon, with a strong arm and iron rule, seizing upon the scattered fragments, and binding them together into one consolidated mass, made France victorious, and seated himself on the throne of empire.
No people in the world ever exhibited a more general and enthusiastic patriotism than the Americans during the war of our own Revolution.