Democrats and Aristocrats 277
their Brunswick Manifesto. The Belgian Van der Noot, rather than stir up the
Belgian people, worked for intervention by Holland, Prussia, and Britain. The Irish
magnates, though often restless under government from Westminster, began to see
their ultimate dependency on the British connection. Even in America the old
aristocracy of the colonial era, the true conservatives that Americans have forgot-
ten, those who ended up in the ranks of the Loyalist émigrés, depended on the
British connection to sustain their position. But although aristocratic interests in
America, Ireland, Holland, and Belgium showed this dependence on Britain, it
would be unfair to single out Britain as unique in this regard. At Geneva the aris-
tocracy willingly depended on France. Events were to show that some in Poland
would rather bring in the Russians than accept a new constitution. It was perfectly
rational for the French to believe, as early as July 1789—whether to hope or to
fear—that a foreign intervention, at the urging of French nobles and émigrés,
might be brought to bear against the Revolution.
On the other hand, even before 1789 or 1792, the leaders of democratization
showed an affinity for France. It was to France that American insurgents and
Dutch Patriots looked for help, from France that emerging Irish radicals expected
encouragement, and in France that democratic refugees found a haven. France
before 1789 was full of Dutch, Belgian, Swiss, Irish, and even English political
expatriates. It was these men, as much as or more than the French themselves,
who were to preach world revolution. No one doubts that the French monarchy
patronized foreign revolutionaries more for political advantage than from ideo-
logical sympathy. The same is probably true of the French republic, even in 1792,
despite all we have been told of world- salvationism in the psychology of the
French Revolution.
The democratic movement failed everywhere, before 1789, except in America.
Not merely did it not transform the world or introduce a heavenly city, which it
hardly intended. Moderate though it was, or seems in restrospect, it failed to ob-
tain any concessions at all. In Ireland the Test Act was repealed for Protestants,
and at Geneva a hundred and fifty Natives remained Burghers after 1782. But in
general it is true to say, and must be emphasized, that all the efforts of English and
Irish parliamentary reformers, and of Dutch, Belgian, and Genevese democrats,
had come to absolutely nothing. Indeed, matters were if anything worse, for the
fear and the vindictiveness of threatened oligarchies had been aroused.
The democratic movement had failed for various reasons, in some places be-
cause the forces of the old order had successfully called upon foreign aid, and in all
cases because the democratic interests, though important and enlightened, were a
numerical minority in the community as a whole. They had no mass following. The
“mass,” outside London, Paris, or Amsterdam, really meant the rural population.
Country people at lower income levels, in the countries now being considered,
were politically unaroused or not much aware of having any serious grievances. So
far as the ruling aristocracies drew their incomes from land, or their influence from
the good will of their tenantry, they had little to fear from disaffected lawyers or
impudent pamphleteers; the one thing that would undermine them was wholesale
defection on their own estates. This did not happen until it happened in France in
the summer of 1789.