Politics & Power Quote by Charles Inglis

Panic is doing double duty here: it’s both a diagnosis and a weapon. Charles Inglis, an Anglican clergyman and Loyalist polemicist, is writing from inside the American Revolution’s propaganda war, and he’s eager to claim the moral high ground by accusing the rebels of exaggeration. The line is engineered to sound measured - he’s not the “inflamed Zealot” - while still delivering a maximalist verdict: whatever the revolution promised, it has produced something “infinitely worse.”

The phrase “even pretended to dread” is the tell. Inglis isn’t just saying the revolution went badly; he’s insinuating that revolutionary fear was always performative, a cynical mobilizing tactic rather than a sincere alarm. That’s a sharp move for a clergyman: it frames the rebellion as a spiritual and civic fraud, a theater of righteous indignation staged to justify rupture with Britain.

Context matters. Loyalists like Inglis were watching institutions crack: the collapse of imperial authority, local committees policing dissent, property seizures, exile. From his vantage point, “Republican” and “Enthusiast” are not neutral descriptors but warnings about zeal unmoored from hierarchy - political and religious. “Enthusiasm” in the 18th-century sense reads as fanaticism, not passion.

The intent, then, is delegitimization. By lumping “Republican” with “Zealot,” Inglis collapses political argument into extremism, suggesting the revolution didn’t just miscalculate policy; it unleashed a contagion of moral disorder. The sentence is calibrated to make the reader feel duped: you were told to fear tyranny, and instead you got chaos.