Morris saw clearly that the popular party in France, composed in part of amiable visionaries, theoretic philanthropists, and closet constitution-mongers, and in part of a brutal, sodden populace, maddened by the grinding wrongs of ages, knew not whither its own steps tended; and he also saw that the then existing generation of Frenchmen were not, and never would be, fitted to use liberty aright. It is small matter for wonder that he could not see as clearly the good which lay behind the movement; that he could not as readily foretell the real and great improvement it was finally to bring about, though only after a generation of hideous convulsions. Even as it was, he discerned what was happening, and what was about to happen, more distinctly than did any one else. The wild friends of the French Revolution, especially in America, supported it blindly, with but a very slight notion of what it really signified. Keen though Morris's intellectual vision was, it was impossible for him to see what future lay beyond the quarter of a century of impending tumult. It did not lie within his powers to applaud the fiendish atrocities of the Red Terror for the sake of the problematical good that would come to the next generation. To do so he would have needed the granite heart of a zealot, as well as the prophetic vision of a seer.
The French Revolution was in its essence a struggle for the abolition of privilege, and for equality in civil rights. This Morris perceived, almost alone among the statesmen of his day; and he also perceived that most Frenchmen were willing to submit to any kind of government that would secure them the things for which they strove. As he wrote to Jefferson, when the republic was well under weigh: "The great mass of the French nation is less solicitous to preserve the present order of things than to prevent the return of the ancient oppression, and of course would more readily submit to a pure despotism than to that kind of monarchy whose only limits were found in those noble, legal and clerical corps by which the people were alternately oppressed and insulted." To the down-trodden masses of continental Europe the gift of civil rights and the removal of the tyranny of the privileged classes, even though accompanied by the rule of a directory, a consul, or an emperor, represented an immense political advance; but to the free people of England, and to the freer people of America, the change would have been wholly for the worse.
