beyond the ken......................

 

     But history would not wait for Louis.  Newly arrived in Paris, Gouverneur Morris, one of the central drafters of the American Constitution and among the keenest observers of the age, echoed the dispatches that his Russian counterpart, Baron Simolin, was sending to Catherine the Great.  Morris was stunned by what he saw.  "We stand on a vast volcano," he observed.  "We feel it tremble, we hear it roar, how and when and where it will burst, and who will be destroyed by its eruptions, is beyond the ken of mortals to discern."  On July 31, 1789, he also added:  "This country is at present as near to anarchy as society can approach without dissolution."  He was right.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800