The inhabitants of those slums were showing
signs of restlessness. They were quite helpless. But the
higher classes, the nobles and the professional men, they too
were beginning to have certain doubts about the economic and
political conditions under which they lived. The success of
the American colonists showed them that many things were
possible which had been held impossible only a short time
before.
According to the poet, the shot which opened the battle
of Lexington was ``heard around the world.'' That was a bit
of an exaggeration. The Chinese and the Japanese and the
Russians (not to speak of the Australians, who had just been
re-discovered by Captain Cook, whom they killed for his
trouble,) never heard of it at all. But it carried across the
Atlantic Ocean. It landed in the powder house of European
discontent and in France it caused an explosion which rocked
the entire continent from Petrograd to Madrid and buried the
representatives of the old statecraft and the old diplomacy
under several tons of democratic bricks.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
THE GREAT FRENCH REVOLUTION PROCLAIMS
THE PRINCIPLES OF LIBERTY,
FRATERNITY AND EQUALITY UNTO ALL
THE PEOPLE OF THE EARTH
BEFORE we talk about a revolution it is just as well that
we explain just what this word means. In the terms of a
great Russian writer (and Russians ought to know what they
are talking about in this field) a revolution is ``a swift overthrow,
in a few years, of institutions which have taken centuries
to root in the soil, and seem so fixed and immovable that
even the most ardent reformers hardly dare to attack them in
their writings.
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