Page:The coronation of Edward the Seventh - a chapter of European and imperial history.djvu/15

 or terrorists, and at the same time made it odious to the English nation.

The revolutionary germ had never taken root in England as a purely philosophic doctrine. Thomas Paine, who argued that "all hereditary government is in its nature tyranny," had no extensive following among his countrymen, in spite of the large circulation of his reply to Burke's memorable Reflections on the French Revolution—the Rights of Man, which Erskine brilliantly defended when the author was indicted for the publication of that work. Had Paine been a popular hero he might have braved his condemnation, instead of flying, before his trial, to France, where citizenship had already been conferred on him, and where on landing he was sent by the Pas de Calais as deputy to the Convention. In that relentless assembly, four months later, he voted and spoke with great courage against the execution of Louis XVI., thus showing how relatively moderate were the extremest revolutionary opinions produced on English soil. But although the progress of the revolutionary doctrine in England was arrested by the spectacle of what it had led to in France, circumstances combined to attenuate the loyalty of the people and to spread the spirit of disaffection, first aroused by the preaching of the anti-monarchical gospel in France, in the period which had seen our revolted American colonies established as