The next developments of the French uprising and the appearance of the Jacobin Clubs, however, alarmed some and gave pause to all of the cautious friends of freedom in America and other countries.
Edmund Burke hysterically sounded the alarm. On account of his championship of the cause of American Independence, Burke had enjoyed much credit with all Americans who had heard of him. "In the last age," exclaimed Burke in Parliament, February 9, 1790, "we were in danger of being entangled by the example of France in the net of a relentless despotism.... Our present danger from the example of a people whose character knows no medium, is, with regard to government, a danger from anarchy; a danger of being led, through an admiration of successful fraud and violence, to an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy."[20]
Of the French declaration of human rights Burke declared: "They made and recorded a sort of _institute_ and _digest_ of anarchy, called the rights of man, in such a pedantic abuse of elementary principles as would have disgraced boys at school.... They systematically destroyed every hold of authority by opinion, religious or civil, on the minds of the people.[21]... On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings," exclaimed the great English liberal, "laws are to be supported only by their own terrours.... In the groves of _their_ academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows."[22]
Burke's extravagant rhetoric, although reprinted in America, was little heeded. It would have been better if his pen had remained idle. For Burke's wild language, not yet justified by the orgy of blood in which French liberty was, later, to be baptized, caused a voice to speak to which America did listen, a page to be written that America did read. Thomas Paine, whose "Common Sense" had made his name better known to all people in the United States than that of any other man of his time except Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Henry, was then in France. This stormy petrel of revolution seems always to have been drawn by instinct to every part of the human ocean where hurricanes were brooding.[23]