demandons."1 Their ideas of eternal justice were something more than an idle abstraction, sounding forth from pulpits or across the pages of the champions of order. It was no metaphysical right of man for which they cried with such simplicity and moderation, but only the practical right of being permitted to save themselves by their own toil from cold, and hunger, and the degradation of the beasts.) Of these mainmortable serfs of ecclesiastics, there are variously said to have been a million, and a million and a half, at the time of the Revolution. Our horror, as we think of the priests and prelates who left palaces and dignities to earn a scanty living by the drudgery of teaching languages in strange lands, is sensibly alleviated by the thought that a million or more of men were rescued from

com a ghastly material misery, and the mental bondage which attended it. The picture of the Bishop of SaintClaude in mean circumstances becomes very supportable, when it is presented as an essential condition of the restoration to humanity of his forty thousand serfs. The vision of the final proportions of eternal justice perhaps grows a little brighter in one's eyes, at the thought.

1 Chassin, i. 159–161. M. Chassin promises an in extenso transcript of this document in his third volume.

We have already seen how in Indian affairs Burke's sympathy with the oppressed millions was undisturbed by his imaginative sympathy with august princes and powerful ministers. In the more momentous and overwhelming affairs of France, we cannot say the same. Admire as we may, and as we ought, his hostile and reasoned judgment against the revolutionary methods, his extraordinary foresight into some of their remote consequences, his general theory of the sacredness of order; still, at the bottom of all, we discern that the lessons deducible from all European history, that of England not excepted, had not } yet made themselves felt within his mind. He shows no consciousness that feudalism and Catholicism, in a certain stage of progress the most binding and indispensable of social conditions, had now, in their season of decay, grown bitterly and fiercely anti-social. Instead of uniting men, and cementing different interests, by strong and common beliefs in the spiritual order, and in the temporal order by protecting the germs of industrial development, the nobles and the clergy had each fallen into a state that was incompatible with the maintenance of any further semblance. of social union. When men spoke of France, what did they mean? A compact society, striving by

different instruments and in various ways, for the promotion of some set of common national aims—such a society as we may now see very partially realized in America, in England, or in Germany? Alas! what they meant was very far removed from this. France, instead of being one society, was in truth an emphatically anarchic accretion of heterogeneous, hostile, and irreconcilable interior societies. To which of these can we point as being penetrated by the sincerely social feeling? Not the clergy; they were prepared to wreck the state, rather than suffer any derogation of the special dignities and privileges of their Church. Not the nobles; at the first or second alarm, with a precipitancy that stamps them as the most ignoble of men, deficient even in the solitary virtue of aristocracy, they fled to beat up foreign enemies against their own countrymen, as the Greek and Italian oligarchs used to do. Not the King and Queen; fed and nurtured, as they were, upon a haughty, absolutist, and now baneful tradition.

It is the essence and significance of all separate classes-capitalist, hereditary, aristocratic, monarchic— to be more or less anti-social in the modern stage, until they have learnt by patient, disinterested, and humane meditation, that the claims of the multitude

are sovereign and paramount, just because it is the multitude. In it you have the only body whose real interests can never, like those of minor classes and special orders, possibly become anti-social. Burke had, as we have seen, fully understood and accepted this truth, and to have done so was one of his most remarkable titles to recollection and distinction in the chronicles of the English constitution. Nothing but his almost uncontrollable passion for anything which only so much as looked like order, could have blinded him to the fact that even the best of classes and divisions have a strong natural tendency to become anti-social, or to the other fact that the classes and divisions then standing in France, so far from being the best, were probably the most sinister, the most fatally committed to anti-social courses, that the civilized world has ever seen. A quarter of a century before the Revolution, he had proclaimed that “a law against the majority of the people is in substance a law against the people itself; its extent determines its validity."1 It would be interesting to know what the royal exiles and patrician emigrants, his friends of later years, would have thought of such a doctrine as this -they, who had habitually and deliberately looked

1 Tracts on the Popery Laws, Works, ii. 436, b.

upon their own narrow order as constituting in substance the people and state of France. Their delusion was natural. The whole fabric of their institutions stood, an arsenal of cunning engines for the moral depression and material. ruin of the majority. The meaning of the Revolution was the emphatic declaration over Europe that the majority of the people are the people.1

The

This lay at the bottom of the cries for liberty, which our generation is apt to find a little empty and unmeaning. The partisans, both of old absolutism, and of its modern sequel, democratic despotism, ask, as Burke did, What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? and they reply to themselves, as he did, that "it is the greatest of all possible evils, for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint." orators of the Revolution, thinkers of a later period, and some persons interested in finding arguments for Bourbonism at one time, and Bonapartism at another, have all combined to show how difficult it is to talk of freedom, without falling either into an egregious common-place, or an egregious sophism. To declaim, as Dr. Price does, about liberty being the foundation of all

1 Cf. Chassin, i. 279, where the reader may see the strong way in which an anonymous pamphleteer of '89 put this.