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a metaphysical standard, instead of one adjusted by the combination of general ideas with maxims derived more immediately from observation and experience, they were sure to erect an impracticable scheme, while they were at the same time and by the same process inflaming their own expectations by exaggerated and impossible hopes. The rights of men in government, as had been said, are their advantages.1 The latter could never be reached by the most ardent scrutiny into the ultimate nature of the former. To construct an abstract entity, and then to evolve from its supposed properties practical laws, must always constitute a sterile, and if carried into operation on a great scale, a ruinous process. Incomparable in fecundity of material resources, in intellectual dexterity and promptitude, and in noble energy in the face of foreign interference, yet can anything be more barren in realised moral products than the French Revolution? Animated as the revolutionists were by some of the most powerful convictions that can enter into the human breast, by a belief in progress, in justice, in brotherhood, yet they seem to have been paralysed whenever they essayed any great incorporation of their ideas in positive institutions, or even in extenCf. antè, p. 31, and pp. 20-24.

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sive measures of destruction, that required courage and faith.

Is not the key to this to be found in their method? Reasoning down from unsubstantial, unsupported conceptions, into which no single objective ingredient has entered from their origin down to the hour of their attempted realization, is the most chilling and fatal of enterprises, where large masses of men are to be dealt with. A sense of isolation ensues that is black and overwhelming to the spirit of man. The air that the philosopher may find full of warmth and peopled with the fanciful creations of abstract research, is to the mass a comfortless and appalling void. The soul cannot live and move in it. Cut off the experience of the race from him, and man trembles. The burning visions of a future of brotherhood, the most gracious side of the Revolution that is open to our contemplation, were inadequate without the support of a religious consciousness of what we owe to past effort. Not nourished by this, the other grew cold and grey. Those who detest the past with indiscriminate execration are sure, in the long run, to come to distrust the future also. The nation or the individual to whom the effort and experience of the race in all bygone time has become as a blank page, a mere doleful chronicle of

blindness and wrong that has done nothing for us and contains no lesson for us, is the certain prey of a crushing reaction.

Alive to these impressions, we can imagine the sympathy with which, not merely vulgar-souled princes and divines, but less ignoble natures, vibrated to some of the admirable truths of the Reflections. "We are afraid," says the author in one place, "to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to have nothing but the naked reason: because prejudice with its reason has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical,

puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature." Is not this to say, in other words, that in every man the substantial foundations of action consist of the accumulated layers which various generations of ancestors have placed for him; that the greater part of our sentiments act most effectively when they act most mechanically, and by the methods of an established, unquestioned system; that although no rule of conduct. or spring of action ought to endure which does not repose in sound reason, yet this naked reason is in itself a less effective means of influencing action, than when it exists as one part of a fabric of ancient and endeared association? This is a truth of human nature which even in time of revolution it is a monstrous fault to overlook. It certainly was not forgotten at the Reformation, which left a thousand undisturbed convictions and habits for each one that it destroyed or directly modified; nor in the English Revolution, when Cromwell manifested in every way his strong sense of the urgent necessity of forbearing to erase existing laws and to violate dominant ideas.

It was something very different from an inflam

1 Works, i. 414, α.

matory appeal to mere conservative passion, to bid France beware of sundering the sacred links which bind together the generations of men, and of rudely cutting off the solemn perpetuity of the commonwealth. It was to place the Reflections a long way above the level of a heated pamphlet, to remind a nation that there is a collective reason of ages, from which they might not refuse to draw with impunity; that there is a continuity in affairs, without which "men would become little better than the flies of a summer." This may be Toryism, but it is Toryism on its noble and exalted side.

The inauspicious pursuit of practical ends by abstract modes was the natural consequence of the predominance of men of letters. All recent thought upon the Revolution, the product of the most diversely trained minds, coincides in fixing upon this circumstance a very important share of the conditions which made the movement a gigantic and terrible, if only transient, failure. De Tocqueville's chapter on the causes which made literary men the principal persons in France, and the effect which this had upon the Revolution, is only a little too cold to be able to pass for Burke's own. Without the passion of a contemporary, he dwells on the fatal characteristic of the writers of the

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