Page:The story of the French revolution (IA storyoffrenchrev00baxe).pdf/24

x instance is brought out all the clearer by comparison with the story of the American Revolution.

The French Revolution, like the American, was the revolution of the bourgeois or oncoming capitalist class. And yet we find that, on the one hand, the identity of the "cause" is lost to many who, wholly unequipped with the key to the understanding of history and blinded by the "accompaniments" of each, consider them wholly distinct phenomena; while, on the other hand, others, somewhat but insufficiently equipped with the historical key, detect the identity of the "cause," but relapse into barren dogmatism through their incapacity to distinguish between "accompaniments." To the one and the other the full significance of the history of the French Revolution is lost, and along with that is lost the pregnant features of the American Revolution.

Numerous are the passages in Belfort Bax' "History of the French Revolution" that furnish in hand the material with which to contrast the difference in "accompaniments" between the French and the American Revolution. Read with an eye to them, his contribution to the store of history is of great value to the philosophy of history.

Material interests determine man's view-point. But material interests are, in their turn, determined by no one circumstance. The material interests that fretted against feudal restraints gave general direction to the revolt of the French bourgeois, and thereby caused its direction to fall within that quarter of the compass into which the American Revolution fell. But the exact point of the compass touched by each depended upon secondary material conditions. With the French Revolution, a sufficiently defined proletarian class simultaneously mounted the historic stage; none such made or could make its appearance in the instance of the American Revolution. To this secondary material fact touching France, and quite clearly brought out by Mr. Bax, is traceable a