can be applied to either is indeed not to be admitted. But between the two there is an important difference. That any reasonable man should assert the right of the individual to educate his children as he pleases seems to us, at the present day, incredible. That any man, on the other hand, should deny the right of the individual to worship as he pleases would seem to many, perhaps to most, men impossible. The importance, not only to the child, but to the community at large, that each child should receive a rational education-an education, that is, of which the standard must, directly or indirectly, be fixed by the State and not by the parenthas become plainer to every civilised nation with every year for the last half-century. The importance, on the contrary, of leaving each man to judge and act for himself in matters of religion is recognised now by a hundred men for every man that held, and suffered for, toleration in the days of Burke.

Thus liberty of education (a liberty which must obviously include that of no education), so far from being regarded as a right, is now universally seen to be inexpedient and a wrong: while liberty of worship, in Burke's day hardly judged to be expedient, has now, in the judgement of most men, come to be recognised as, in the strictest sense of the term, a right. But, on a closer examination, even in matters of religion, freedom must be admitted to be no concern of right. It is true that, so far as religion is confined to inward belief, all interference would justly be regarded as monstrous. But when religion expresses itself in overt acts, when, as has happened more than once within recent experience, religion comes to be bound up with practices condemned as criminal, or when religion compels men to act as rebels, who will deny that the State may justly interfere? Who will venture to assert that rigorous punishment is a wrong? We thought it a duty to suppress the Thugs and the Suttee; we should not think it a violation of duty to prevent a Catholic from obeying the Pope, supposing that the Pope should issue orders in defiance of the laws of the land. It may be said that such repressive acts on the part of the State are not directed against religion, but against crime or against bad citizenship. But, if crime or bad citizenship have come to be part of religion in the mind of the worshipper, to draw such a distinction is simply idle. In the face of all argument, the person who suffers will persist in believing that he suffers for the sake not of his acts but of his creed. And, as it is indisputable that, save for his creed, he would not have been prompted to commit the act for which he suffers, he will always have the last word in the dispute. But if it is proper, even in one case, however rare, for the State to punish religious practice, what becomes of the right, which Burke claims for

each individual, to worship as he pleases? A right is universal, or it is nothing.

No doubt, save in extreme cases, it is in the last degree inexpedient for the State to interfere in matters of religion. And the reason is obvious. In the first place, all belief, and above all religious belief, is a matter of the heart. That being so, punishment, except for vindictive purposes, is either powerless, or powerful only to produce hypocrisy. The means employed have no relation to the end which they profess to seek. The end sought is to change the belief; the end attained is to leave the belief either unchanged, or possibly even strengthened, in the sufferer; and to others more seductive, from sympathy with his sufferings. In the second place, and in consequence, once embarked in such a contest, the State is only too likely-as those who framed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy are thought by some to have found to their cost-to be defeated. On both grounds, therefore, both from the certain severity of the struggle, as regards itself, and from the probable futility of the result, as regards the sufferers, it is manifestly expedient that, unless when the danger from noninterference is terrible and obvious, the State should refuse to interfere.

Thus, to deny that religious freedom is a matter of right is by no means to encourage the State in interference with religious liberty. The wisest statesman is he who will interfere the least. For practical purposes the champion of right and the wise champion of expediency will, in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred, be found to agree. It remains true that for speculative purposes their differences are not to be reconciled. The man who has urged unrestrained freedom for religious conviction as a right in one case is bound, by every principle of logic, to maintain it as a right in all. How then, after asserting the right of the French Catholics to maintain their religion unaltered even in financial organisation by the State, Burke could square it with his sense of honour to cry out for 'criminal justice' upon Paine, who had done nothing more than lay his political and religious creed before the English nation, it would be hard indeed to say. On the ground of expediency, the justice of Paine's prosecution may have been an arguable matter. But, in an evil hour for himself, Burke had emphatically excluded matters of conscience from the domain of expediency; for such matters he had emphatically claimed liberty as a right.

It was because Burke never reached the conception of progress that the principles of justice and expediency jostled each other uneasily in his system; that, in attempting to go beyond the

principle of expediency, he fell back, as we have seen, into the crudest form of the principle of right; that, in attempting to keep within the bounds of expediency, he condemned his own country, and that of his neighbours, to complete inertness and denied the necessity of the most necessary reforms. It was for this reason that, while moving under the flag of expediency, Burke failed to bring expediency into any rational relation-any relation that was not purely external-towards progress; and that, while moving under the flag of justice, he failed to bring justice into relation— if it were but an external relation-towards expediency. It was for this reason that, even when for the moment he had claimed a religious function for the State-a function which, we may boldly say, can only be justified on the theory that, for the nation as for the individual, truth and falsehood are concerns of life and deathBurke went on to close with the desperate doctrine that even superstition is not to be discouraged, that it may give valuable aid to the policeman's truncheon, and that in fact-after the language of Gibbon- to the statesman all religions are equally useful.' It was for this reason that he cast scorn upon the efforts of the Revolutionists in France 2-efforts misdirected indeed in their means, but in their end no less heroic than they are memorable to engage for perfection' and for truth. It was for this reason, finally, that his theory on the origin, as opposed to the functions, of the State was so curiously halting and inconsistent.

On this point it is necessary that we should pause for a moment. In other great political writers-notably in Hobbes, in Locke and in Rousseau-the question, "What was the origin of Society? plays, and rightly plays, a very important part. By Burke, on the other hand, the question is only treated in passing; and the answer to it is given not so much directly, as by implication. This, no doubt, is natural in a man whose first object was not speculative but practical. And, if Burke had altogether kept silence on the subject, no objection could have reasonably been raised. But the truth is that, in more than one passage, Burke does distinctly raise the question, How came it that Society was formed?' And, in more than one passage, the answer given is an answer that would have come more appropriately from Locke or Rousseau than from Burke.

Again and again, notably in the Reflections and in the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Burke casts in his lot unequivocally with the theory of a social contract. How little that theory squares with the doctrine of expediency, how closely it is bound up with the incompatible theory of rights it is hardly necessary to point out. The theory of contract, indeed, was simply devised to 1 Reflections, i. p. 441. 2 Appeal, i. p. 534.

save the existence of indefeasible rights, the birthright of each individual in every state, because guarded by express stipulation in the contract from which every state took its origin. Throughout it assumes the existence of those rights; and, but for the unquestioning assumption of those rights, it would never, in the face of all history and all probability, have won its way; perhaps it would never even have seen the light. This, however, is the theory which Burke, at moments, carelessly accepts. In accepting it, he forgets that no state, founded upon contract, could claim to be governed afterwards by expediency; that no state, whose beginning was laid in contract, could be completed under the guidance of perfection and of justice; that to no theory of contract is that countenance given by history which he, of all men, was bound most rigorously to exact.

That Burke should, even for the moment, have rested satisfied with an account, so ill-supported by history and so little in accordance with his own surest convictions, can only be set down to the hold which the doctrine of an original contract had laid upon the men of his own generation; a hold so strong that even the most cautious and the most sceptical were apt to submit to it without a murmur and without question. There were times, however, when the native strength of Burke asserted itself against an alien superstition. At such times, throwing to the winds the fables of a state of nature and a social contract, and reverting to the surer ground marked out by Aristotle and by Cicero, Burke asserted that the real parentage of society was to be sought not in contract, but in instinct; that man was essentially a social creature; that the real state of nature for man was not isolation but communion. Aristotle, in memorable words, had written: þúσei äv0pwπoS πολιτικὸν ζῶον. 'Art is man's nature' is Burke's emphatic way of stating the same belief.

It was probably under the influence of the same thought that Burke wrote elsewhere: 'We must throw a veil over the beginnings of all government.' These characteristic words, no doubt, point partly to that sense of mystery or reverence, so habitual in Burke, and so sure a mark of greatness. They spring also, it must be admitted, from a more questionable desire, by no means faintly to be discerned in Burke, to surround the ruler with the hazy splendour of a religious halo. But, over and above all this, it is scarcely fanciful to see in them a warning how little the birth of any institution, above all of that institution which includes all others, will bear inspection; a reminder that the instinct from which society sprang, unlike the grandiose sense of freedom which had given birth to the supposed social contract, was a strange 1 Speeches on Hastings' Impeachment, i. p. 60.

mixture of good and bad; a hint that brute force, as well as the instinct of fellowship, had played a larger part in the political training of past times than it is well for later generations to recall.

Here, then, once again our feet stand on firm ground. In this respect, as in so many others, the historical instinct of Burke presents a bright contrast to the somewhat thin reasonings of Locke, and to the feverish imaginations of Rousseau and of Hobbes. Standing on this ground, Burke had no need to cancel, with Hobbes, the rare moments occupied by liberty, or, with Locke and Rousseau, the long ages occupied by slavery, in the history of man. A strange blending of freedom and oppression in its origin, society has remained a strange blending of freedom and oppression in all its stages. And no theory, which refuses to recognise this, can claim for one moment to have grasped the secret of the tangled web which it proposes to unravel, or to have preserved the unity of that history which it professes to explain. It would indeed, as has been said already, be absurd to claim that Burke had that clear conception of progress which must be achieved before the unity of history is to be anything better than a blank and unsubstantial form. But in his more luminous remarks upon the origin, as in those upon the functions, of society he at least deserves the honour of having said nothing inconsistent with the ideas of unity and of progress; of having even anticipated those ideas, in a rudimentary shape; of having paved the way for a more complete realisation of them in an after time.

It had been the dominant tendency of Rousseau to put a ban both upon history and upon reason. It was the dominant tendency of Burke to restore both history and reason to their proper place. It is of course true that, throughout, Burke did no more than assume the idea of progress; that he did not realise its importance either for purposes of speculation, or for purposes of practice; that he made no attempt to bring it into harmony with those secondary conceptions on which, as was not unnatural in a practical statesman, he laid exaggerated stress. But in the most fruitful of those secondary conceptions, in the principle of expediency, he had grasped a thought which, even when qualified by his natural timidity, gave him, at least for such matters as concerned the dealings of England with her dependencies far and near, invaluable guidance; which should, logically, have been applied by him, and which both in his own and in later days has been applied by others, to the conduct of affairs within the borders of England herself; which, finally, was an anticipation and a reflection—if perhaps a reflection somewhat dim-of those ideas of unity and progress that have been the laborious conquest of the succeeding generations.

To these conquests Burke pointed the way. He did not him