but with practical morality. Yet what more indisputable law, what more important principle, has ever been contributed to the stock of political ideas? If this method had occupied the place in the minds of politicians to which its profound value entitles it, the volume of history would be without two of its most fatal chapters. It would lack, first, the record of those fatuous struggles, to enforce a right only because it is a right; and second, the still more painful chronicle of those great men who have wasted lives of noble purpose, lofty ideas, heroic endurance, in endeavours to carry out beneficent schemes in the face of an iron antagonism of circumstance and conditions. If Burke's contemporaries had all understood as thoroughly as he did the fruitlessness alike of abstract rights and abstract ideals, we should not have had to read the history of our war with the American colonies, nor the history of the failure of such men as Joseph II. and Charles III.

It has been reserved for a great thinker of a later day to explain the source and significance of absolute conceptions in social subjects, and to insist on the substitution of relative ideas in their place. This is the natural result of the substitution of the Positive for the Abstractional philosophy, inasmuch as the latter proposes to study the nature of Beings, while

the former only studies the laws of Phenomena and supposes a gradual improvement of observation. We may now comprehend the absurdity, on scientific grounds, of setting up absolute and immutable types of government. We have now been at least partially instructed in the hopelessness of supposing that "social phenomena can be modified at will," "that the human. race has no spontaneous impulsion, but is always ready to yield to any influence of the legislator, spiritual or temporal, provided he is invested with a sufficient. authority." Burke, though he was not in a position to place this doctrine on the inexpugnable scientific basis which belongs to it, and on which Comte has placed it, was still directed to it by virtue of his native vigour and acuteness. We shall consider this further when we come to the epoch of the French Revolution, and the consummation of those metaphysical and absolute ideas which Burke so vehemently rejected.

If Burke had achieved nothing else beyond the discovery (for it was a discovery with him) and enforcement of this great truth, he would clearly have established a position in the front rank of political thinkers. But this, and the much more that he did in

1 Cf. Comte's Positive Philosophy; Miss Martineau's Translation ii. 72.

the same department of thought, has been partially overshadowed by the qualities which made him a rhetorician as well as a thinker. His natural ardour always impelled him to clothe his conclusions in glowing and exaggerated phrases. Nobody would be disposed to deny that Bentham was a thinker, and yet he constantly displays a heat, an acrimony, a contemptuousness, that is only different from the unphilosophic language of Burke in being less majestic and overwhelming. A rhetorician deals with words and images, and, hurried by them out of the path that leads to truth, is thus in the long run deprived even of a desire to find it. Burke's style unquestionably partook of that opimum quoddam et tanquam adipate orationis genus which the Roman orator has described. The framework of what he has to say is too thickly overlaid with Asiatic ornament. His language burns with too consuming a blaze for the whole to diffuse that clear, undisturbed light which we are accustomed to find in men who have trained themselves to balance ideas, to weigh mutually opposed speculations, in short, to argue and to reason with no passion stronger than an intense desire to discover on what side or on what sort of middle way the truth lies. Those who have acquired a love for political thought amid the almost

mathematical closeness and precision of Hobbes, the philosophic calm of Locke, or even the majestic and solemn fervour of Milton, are in a manner revolted by the unrestrained passion and the decorated style of Burke. His passion appears hopelessly fatal to anything like success in the pursuit of Truth, who does not reveal herself to followers thus inflamed. His ornate style does not appear less fatal to that cautious and precise method of statement, suitable to matter which is not known at all unless it is known distinctly.

To understand this more clearly, we must constantly remember that Burke was actively engaged in the thick of the political fight. This was a source both of weakness and of strength to him. It weakened him as a philosopher, because he came to the consideration of his problems with something of a sinister interest in solving them in one way rather than another. If he could find a solution that was in accordance with Whig tactics, or what was still narrower, but still better for himself, a solution that justified the Rockingham section of the Whigs, it was to his intérest to do sonot his interest in any sordid sense, for Burke's character was not of a kind to yield to or even to be conscious of temptations of that order, but to his interest as a keen partisan whose peace of mind was staked in the

fact of his party being in the right. We shall have occasion further on to discuss Burke's own views as to the uses and obligations of party. There can be no question that his passion did constantly blind him to those loftier considerations which should always be present to the mind of the philosopher, and that in one portion of his career (1788-9) he actually surrendered himself to a systematic factiousness that fell little short of being downright unscrupulous. At the same time it is just to remember that the most memorable act of Burke's public life was his unhesitating abandonment and violent disruption of his party when what he conceived to be the dictates of political wisdom were no longer the guide of their conduct. He was never so obstinately deaf to the voice of what he took for wisdom, never so utterly given over to intellectual reprobation, as to regard allegiance to his associates as the prime and most binding of all duties. He frequently voted away from his leaders and friends. He had barely been in the House a year before he declined to vote for a motion brought forward by Dowdeswell, and supported with all their might by the Rockingham and the Grenville sections of his party, proposing to take a shilling in the pound off the land-tax :-a motion which was carried against the Government, the very spirited