Church of England 'raising her mitred head in Courts and Parliaments' and providing archbishops and bishops with salaries of £10,000 a year for the salvation of the miserable Rich,' is perhaps the strongest illustration which can be given of it. The way in which 'we,' the people of England in general, are described throughout the whole of the Reflections, as holding this or that, which Burke thinks we ought to hold, is another: We fear God; we look up with awe to Kings, with affection to Parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility. .. We think that

no discoveries are to be made in morality, nor many in the great principles of government. . . . We are resolved to keep an established Church, an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an estab lished democracy, each in the degree it exists, and in no greater.. Our education is in a manner wholly

in the hands of ecclesiastics.'

It is worth observing, by the way, that in the first Letter on a Regicide Peace, he gives further particulars as to who 'we' are. He says that 'In England and Scotland I compute that those of adult age, not declining in life, of tolerable leisure for such discussions, and of the means of information more or less, and who are above menial dependence (or what virtually is such), may amount to about 400,000. This is the British public.'

He adds, 'Of these 400,000 political citizens, I look upon one-fifth, or about 80,000, to be pure

VOL. III

L

Jacobins, utterly incapable of amendment, objects of eternal vigilance, and, when they break out, of legal constraint.' The 'we,' therefore, who think all these fine things, are only that majority of a minority, which is obtained by taking credit for all the indifferent and undecided members who even passively adhere to what exists. The most active part of the minority are 'pure Jacobins,' and probably four-fifths of the adult males of the nation are not to be considered at all. This diminishes the force of the declamation about 'we.'

A second and a still more important rule with Burke is, that we are not only to make the best of all existing institutions, but are to accept as final the theoretical basis on which they rest. Utility, and not truth, is the object of politics; those who seek for truth, and act upon the assumption that they have. found it by attacking the existing state of things, are liable to every hard name which Burke lavished on the revolutionists. The relation between utility and truth as conceived by the great writers of the eighteenth century, and the question how far their theory on the subject was true, are matters of too much importance to be incidentally discussed, and would afford a curious subject of separate inquiry.

Such, if we rightly understand it, is Burke's general view of the nature of civil society and of the abomination of revolutions. What is to be said of it? The first remark to be made upon the matter is that, if by a lucky accident the state of things at a given

time and place is such that such a theory can be accepted and acted upon, the theory is itself superfluous. No one pulls down his house when it is obvious that nothing is required beyond ordinary repairs.

In the case of the French the event showed that matters had gone far too deep to be treated in the manner which Burke suggested. It was impossible to take any real security against a counter-revolution without disabling, as well as dispossessing, the defeated party. The horrors of the struggle were the effect, not the cause, of its profundity, and of the irreconcileable difference between the two parties which were brought into fierce collision, without any sort of previous training in the arts which mitigate civil strife. To have got a British Constitution out of the Revolution, the history of France ought to have been the history of England.

It is, however, superabundantly proved, by the history of now nearly three generations, that Burke utterly misconceived the nature and durability of the particular temporary condition of things which he idealised under the name of the British Constitution. What he understood by those words, if indeed it ever existed at all except in his own imagination, has altogether passed away. The young physicians have got over the awe with which they used to look upon their fathers' liver and have treated the old man in a manner much more effective than reverential.

If we had had several generations of statesmen

passionately intent upon keeping up a proper balance between the three elements of the Constitution, where should we all have been at the present moment? Our course has in reality been a far simpler one than Burke ever thought it possible for the course of policy to be. That curious and fundamentally contradictory theory which taught on the one hand that a Constitution was something divine and mysterious, not to say uncreated and ineffable, and which, on the other, regarded it as an infinitely complicated and wonderful 'moral machine which must never be touched except by the most skilful artists, imbued with a passionate reverence for the very things that they were going to alter, has pretty well ceased to influence the thoughts, though it still to a certain extent retains its place in the language, of men.

Very plain and simple notions have taken the place of Burke's refinements. 'We,' to use his own language, are for the most part willing to live and let live, and to interfere very little with the political powers, and not at all with the social position, of different classes, so long as they do not interfere with the general march of events, and with the deliberate opinions and feelings of the great mass of the people; but when those opinions and feelings assume by degrees as they occasionally do—a definite shape upon any specific subject, they are altogether irresistible, and, happily for us all, serious and conscious attempts to resist them are no longer made.

This is pretty much the result of the constitutional and political discussions of the last seventy or eighty years. If Burke was right (as no doubt he was) as to the importance of prescription and possession, the respect due to existing facts, and the flimsiness of some of the metaphysical theories which he so much detested, still, on the other hand, the fact for it is a fact of the sovereignty of the people in the broadest sense of the words, has been established in this country by the general course of events, in a manner which is altogether unquestionable and conclusive. Nor can the struggles which led to its recognition, both in France and England, be denied to have been justified by the result, awful as they undoubtedly were in some of their details.

There is but one other remark which it appears to be necessary to make. Burke through the whole of his criticisms on the French Revolution regards it as an attack on the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, in whatever special form those doctrines might be expressed. To a certain extent this was undoubtedly

true.

The old state of things in France was no doubt founded on the hypothesis of the truth of the Roman Catholic version of the Christian religion. It is equally clear that the new state of things is founded on the supposition that, whether that or any other form of positive religion is true or not, political society has a basis of its own, on which it can stand independently, according to which basis religion must,