Nothing is more apt to remind philosophers and statesmen of the need for modesty than the history of the French Revolution, for no event was greater or longer in the making or more fully prepared yet so little anticipated.

Not even Frederick the Great, for all his genius, sensed what was coming. He was in contact with it yet failed to see it. Indeed, his actions were in accord with the spirit of the Revolution before the fact. He was its precursor and, in a manner of speaking, its agent. Yet he did not see it looming on the horizon, and when at last it did show its face, the remarkable new features that would set it apart from a host of other revolutions initially went unnoticed.

Outside of France the Revolution aroused universal curiosity. It made people everywhere think that new times were coming and stirred vague hopes of change and reform, but no one yet suspected what it was to become. Princes and their ministers lacked even the shadowy forebodings that agitated the masses. At first they regarded the Revolution as one of those periodic maladies to which the constitutions of all nations are liable, whose only effect is to afford new opportunities to the policy of their neighbors. If by chance they hit upon the truth about the Revolution, they did so unwittingly.