Time and events, meanwhile, had been powerfully telling for Burke.  While he was writing his Appeal, the French king and queen had destroyed whatever confidence sanguine dreamers might have had in their loyalty to the new order of things, by attempting to escape over the frontier.  They were brought back, and a manful attempt was made to get the new constitution to work, in the winter of 1791-92.  It was soon found out that Mirabeau had been right when he said that for a monarchy it was too democratic, and for a republic there was a king too much.  This was Burke’s Reflections in a nutshell.  But it was foreign intervention that finally ruined the king, and destroyed the hope of an orderly issue.  Frederick the Great had set the first example of what some call iniquity and violence in Europe, and others in milder terms call a readjustment of the equilibrium of nations.  He had taken Silesia from the house of Austria, and he had shared in the first partition of Poland.  Catherine II. had followed him at the expense of Poland, Sweden, and Turkey.  However we may view these transactions, and whether we describe them by the stern words of the moralist, or the more deprecatory words of the diplomatist, they are the first sources of that storm of lawless rapine which swept over every part of Europe for five and twenty years to come.  The intervention of Austria and Prussia in the affairs of France was originally less a deliberate design for the benefit of the old order, than an interlude in the intrigues of Eastern Europe.  But the first effect of intervention on behalf of the French monarchy was to bring it in a few weeks to the ground.

In the spring of 1792 France replied to the preparations of Austria and Prussia for invasion by a declaration of war.  It was inevitable that the French people should associate the court with the foreign enemy that was coming to its deliverance.  Everybody knew as well then as we know it now that the queen was as bitterly incensed against the new order of things, and as resolutely unfaithful to it, as the most furious emigrant on the Rhine.  Even Burke himself, writing to his son at Coblenz, was constrained to talk about Marie Antoinette as that “most unfortunate woman, who was not to be cured of the spirit of court intrigue even by a prison.”  The king may have been loyally resigned to his position, but resignation will not defend a country from the invader; and the nation distrusted a chief who only a few months before had been arrested in full flight to join the national enemy.  Power naturally fell into the hands of the men of conviction, energy, passion, and resource.  Patriotism and republicanism became synonymous, and the constitution against which Burke had prophesied was henceforth a dead letter.  The spirit of insurrection that had slumbered since the fall of the Bastille and the march to Versailles in 1789, now awoke in formidable violence, and after the preliminary rehearsal of what is known in the