194 Chapter IX
enormous turning point in the entire history of the human race. This was that
sense of a new era already mentioned. Even conservatives, or dispassionate observ-
ers like the Venetian ambassador to Paris, sensed that something tremendous had
happened. The young Rotterdam patrician, Van Hogendorp, made a trip to Amer-
ica in 1782, at the age of twenty, to enlarge his knowledge of the world. He met
and was chilled by George Washington; he did not believe the American union
would last; he denied that the Americans, a people of farmers, should be admired
or imitated in Europe. But he stated as a fact that the example of “man restored to
his rights” had had wide repercussions: “In Ireland a revolution is going on without
civil war and even without causing astonishment. In France, I am assured, there is
much agitation. The Germans bear the yoke of an arrogant nobility with impa-
tience. In the United Provinces power is taken from the hands to which it was
entrusted. A British vessel, stopping on the way back from India at the Comoro
Islands in the Mozambique Channel, finds the native inhabitants in revolt against
their Arab masters; and when they ask why they have taken arms, are told: ‘Amer-
ica is free. Could not we be?’ ”^25 It is curious to hear of native Africans appealing to
the American Revolution a century before the European supremacy.
Learned bodies in the 1780’s, in the fashion of the time, set contests for the best
paper on the effects of the discovery of America upon the world. Many such pa-
pers were written in France; at least two are known at the University of Copenha-
gen, and one at the University of Upsala.^26 “In a little while,” wrote one French
enthusiast, commenting on America, “there will be nothing to which man cannot
attain.”^27 Another envied those who would see the close of the wonderful eigh-
teenth century, of whose glories the American Revolution had given only an inti-
mation. A German poem on Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert began by intoning,
Und der Mensch war wieder nun Mensch, der Edlen
Viele pflanzten emsig den Keim der Wahrheit,
Fern an Philadelphias Ufer glühte
Milderes Frühroth.^28That America was the hope of the humanity, the asylum of liberty, the beacon
for all ages to come, was the common talk among the more fervid in France. The
Swiss Iselin apparently agreed with a letter that he published in his journal, to the
effect that anyone favoring oppression of the Americans sinned against mankind.
In Germany when Schlözer criticized the Americans as rebels he was answered by
Jakob Mauvillon, who, defending the principle of the sovereignty of the people,
found “a secret bond... which links the cause of the Colonies with the welfare and
25 A memorandum, “Considérations sur la Révolution de l’Amérique,” written at Breda, 1784, in
G. K. van Hogendorp, Brieven en Gedenkschriften (The Hague, 1866), I, 407.
26 N. C. Clausson, Vndersogelse om Amerikas Opdagelse har mere stadet end garnet del meunestelige
Kion (Copenhagen, 1785); J. Svedelius, De effectu detectae Americae in Europam (Upsala, 1802); Weber,
op.cit., 66.
27 Mailhe, op.cit., 29.
28 H. S. King, Echoes of the American Revolution in German Literature, in Univ. of California Pub-
lications in Modern Philology, XIV, 2 (Berkeley, 1929), 157.