A little book forgotten for a century and a half, Friedrich Gentz's Origin and Principles of the American Revolution, compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution, has recently been reprinted in the United States. For the revolutions of our own century have given it renewed meaning. In the first year of the nineteenth century John Quincy Adams, only thirty-three years old, was Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States to Prussia. Adams educated himself the whole of his life; and, perfecting his German during his residence at Berlin, he translated from the Berlin Historisches Journal (April and May, 1800) a long article on the French and American Revolutions by Friedrich Gentz, a rising Prussian man of letters, three years older than the precocious Adams. Gentz was the founder, editor, and sole contributor to this remarkable magazine of ideas. These were men of mark: Adams would become President of the United States, and Gentz, with Metternich, the architect of European conservatism. "It cannot but afford a gratification to every American attached to his country," Adams wrote to Gentz, "to see its revolution so ably vindicated from the imputation of having originated, or been conducted upon the same principles, as that of France."

Gentz had studied under Kant, but Burke's Reflections had converted the young man to conservative principles, and, abhorring the theories and consequences of the French Revolution, he had translated the Reflections into German, thus exerting his first influence upon European politics and making his reputation. Like Gentz, the younger Adams had been profoundly influenced by Burke; and though he tried to act the role of arbiter between Burke and Paine, Adams really was persuaded by all Burke's principal arguments. His Letters of Publicola, published in 1791, had demolished Paine's Rights of Man and had cudgeled the French revolutionaries, enraging Jefferson. The Americans, young Adams had written, had not fallen into the pit of radical abstract doctrine: "Happy, thrice happy the people of America, whose gentleness of manners and habits of virtue are still sufficient to reconcile the enjoyment of their natural rights with the peace and tranquillity of their country; whose principles of religious liberty did not result from an indiscriminate contempt of all religion whatever, and whose equal representation in their legislative councils was founded upon an equality really existing among them, and not upon the metaphysical speculations of fanciful politicians, vainly contending against the unalterable course of events and the established order of nature."

Thus Adams was of one mind with Gentz, and saw in Gentz's essay the most succinct and forceful contrast between the moderate polity of the American colonies, founded upon a respect for prescriptive rights and custom, and the leveling theories of French radicalism. Only the word "Republic" was common to the two new dominations, Adams perceived; and the French Republic already had ceased to contain any element of true representative government.