The Reflections had not been published many months before Burke wrote the Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (January 1791), in which strong disapproval had grown into furious hatred.  In contains the elaborate diatribe against Rousseau, the grave panegyric on Cromwell for choosing Hale to be Chief Justice, and a sound criticism on the laxity and want of foresight in the manner in which the States-General had been convened.  Here first Burke advanced to the position that it might be the duty of other nations to interfere to restore the king to his rightful authority, just as England and Prussia had interfered to save Holland from confusion, as they had interfered to preserve the hereditary constitution in the Austrian Netherlands, and as Prussia had interfered to snatch even the malignant and the turban’d Turk from the pounce of the Russian eagle.  Was not the King of France as much an object of policy and compassion as the Grand Seignior?  As this was the first piece in which Burke hinted at a crusade, so it was the first in which he began to heap upon the heads, not of Hebert, Fouquier-Tinville, Billaud, nor even of Robespierre or Danton—­for none of these had yet been heard of—­but of able and conscientious men in the Constituent Assembly, language of a virulence which Fox once said seriously that Burke had picked, even to the phrases of it, out of the writings of Salmasius against Milton, but which is really only to be paralleled by the much worse language of Milton against Salmasius.  It was in truth exactly the kind of incensed speech which, at a later date, the factions in Paris levelled against one another, when Girondins screamed for the heads of Jacobins, and Robespierre denounced Danton, and Tallien cried for the blood of Robespierre.

Burke declined most wisely to suggest any plan for the National Assembly.  “Permit me to say,”—­this is in the letter of January 1791, to a member of the Assembly,—­“that if I were as confident as I ought to be diffident in my own loose general ideas, I never should venture to broach them, if but at twenty leagues’ distance from the centre of your affairs.  I must see with my own eyes; I must in a manner touch with my own hands, not only the fixed, but momentary circumstances, before I could venture to suggest any political project whatsoever.  I must know the power and disposition to accept, to execute, to persevere.  I must see all the aids and all the obstacles.  I must see the means of correcting the plan, where correctives would be wanted.  I must see the things:  I must see the men.  Without a concurrence and adaptation of these to the design, the very best speculative projects might become not only useless but mischievous.  Plans must be made for men.  People at a distance must judge ill of men.  They do not always answer to their reputation when you approach them.  Nay, the perspective varies, and shows them quite other than you thought them.  At a distance, if we judge uncertainly