protest. Its dogma of the Sovereignty of the People-in other words, its claim for the immediate participation of every nation, both in its own internal 'government and in the choice of attitude to be assumed towards other nations-was levelled against hereditary absolutism, and it will one day be revived against that strange incongruity, democratic despotism. This dogma was exposed, by the way in which it was first propounded, to the attacks both of Burke and of subsequent thinkers. It was based upon that ground of natural, inherent, and imprescriptible right which he and they justly held to be no base at all.1 To allege that a community had a right to govern itself, was necessarily unconvincing to anybody who should choose to allege that a hereditary king or the government of some other community had a right to govern them. (Not advancing beyond rights, Filmer and a French Revolutionist were on a par. There was no possibility of any point of reconciliation or common ground between them; so the one flung himself back on Abraham and the Bible, and the other invented a social contract, and then each easily and decisively vanquished the other. If the Revolutionists, instead of reverting to an imaginary social contract which they 1 Antè, pp. 145–7.

had first to create, had adopted Burke's own standard of the general utility, they could have made out a case for the sovereignty of the people, that for a nation in their then state of mental preparation, would have been thoroughly inexpugnable. If, instead of treading on the narrow and barren metaphysical heights, they had shown that for a highly political people—a people, that is, of great public spirit, great excitability about public affairs, and an ever-increasing capacity of forming judgments upon them-any government in which they do not more or less directly participate is essentially unstable, they would have adduced an argument worth a hundred social contracts. If they had shown, moreover, that certain desirable consequences flow from the government of a people by itself which are wanting in less popular forms-that it increases the stock of national self-respect, a force so strongly protective against petulance, irritable apprehension, and unreasonable jealousy of other nations— that it secures a complete and unwavering regard to the interests of the majority, the first and most difficult of all the ends of government-that it preserves confidence and order by effecting through a peaceful and general expression of popular will those modifications which otherwise can only be achieved by the

violent destruction of much that it is desirable to retain if they had dwelt upon these points, they would have found strong and unshaken arguments for a doctrine, which has only been discredited because it was clothed in flaunting metaphysical garments.

That the criterion of general happiness should have been thus ignored in favour of inherent right, is the more curious, and perhaps the more lamentable, because the Revolution was unquestionably the most gigantic effort that has ever been made to establish this criterion

1 firmly and permanently in political affairs. This task,

with a thousand errors of detail, some of them the worst and grossest that the history of politics has to show, with some narrow fanaticism, and with much shortsightedness as to means, the Revolution accomplished. It made conformity to general utility, in its widest sense, the practical standard of the right of any government to the allegiance of its subjects. Thus Burke, the greatest statesman who has adhered to this doctrine, must be pronounced to have been much nearer to the best, most vital, and most durable part of the Revolution than he knew, and than his successors have supposed.

It is not certain that he was not now and then for a moment startled by the suspicion that he might

unawares be fighting against the truth. In the midst of flaming and bitter pages, we now and again feel a cool breath from the distant region of a half-pensive tolerance. "I do not think," he says at the close of the Reflections, to the person to whom they were addressed, "that my sentiments are likely to alter yours. I do not know that they ought. You are young; you cannot guide, but must follow, the fortune of your country. But hereafter they may be of some use to you, in some future form which your commonwealth may take. In the present it can hardly remain ; but before its final settlement, it may be obliged to pass, as one of our poets says, 'through great varieties of untried being,' and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and blood."

He felt in the midst of his hate that what he took for seething chaos, might after all be the struggle upwards of the germs of order. Then again, almost the last words he wrote on the Revolution were these:

"If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will

appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men." With these mag

nanimous thoughts in his heart, let us leave him. They were the last ray of that mens divinior which, amid the sharp press of manifold cares and distractions, had ever vibrated with generous and highminded sympathies, and which, now that the night was falling, did not let go its faith in the beneficent powers and processes of the Unseen Time.

THE END.

LONDON R. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR, PRINTFRS.