This system was at first followed.[7] Excellent pamphlets from the pen of Condorcet prepared the people for liberty; the 10th of August, the republican decrees, the battle of Valmy, the retreat of the Prussians, the victory of Jemappes, all spoke in favor of France:  all was rapidly destroyed by the revolutionary power.  Without doubt, good intentions made the majority of the Assembly adopt it; they would plant the tree of liberty in a foreign soil, under the shade of a people already free.  To the eyes of the people of Belgium it seemed but the mask of a new foreign tyranny.  This opinion was erroneous; I will suppose it so for a moment; but still this opinion of Belgium deserved to be considered.  In general, we have always considered our own opinions and our own intentions rather than the people whose cause we defend.  We have given those people a will:  that is to say, we have more than ever alienated them from liberty.

How could the Belgic people believe themselves free, since we exercise for them, and over them, the rights of sovereignty,—­when, without consulting them, we suppress, all in a mass, their ancient usages, their abuses, their prejudices, those classes of society which without doubt are contrary to the spirit of liberty, but the utility of whose destruction was not as yet proved to them?  How could they believe themselves free and sovereign, when we made them take such an oath as we thought fit, as a test to give them the right of voting?  How could they believe themselves free, when openly despising their religious worship, which religious worship that superstitious people valued beyond their liberty, beyond even their life; when we proscribed their priests; when we banished them from their assemblies, where they were in the practice of seeing them govern; when we seized their revenues, their domains, and riches, to the profit of the nation; when we carried to the very censer those hands which they regarded as profane?  Doubtless these operations were founded on principles; but those principles ought to have had the consent of the Belgians, before they were carried into practice; otherwise they necessarily became our most cruel enemies.

Arrived ourselves at the last bounds of liberty and equality, trampling under our feet all human superstitions, (after, however, a four years’ war with them,) we attempt all at once to raise to the same eminence men, strangers even to the first elementary principles of liberty, and plunged for fifteen hundred years in ignorance and superstition; we wished to force men to see, when a thick cataract covered their eyes, even before we had removed that cataract; we would force men to see, whose dulness of character had raised a mist before their eyes, and before that character was altered.[8]

Do you believe that the doctrine which now prevails in France would have found many partisans among us in 1789?  No:  a revolution in ideas and in prejudices is not made with that rapidity; it moves gradually; it does not escalade.