that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is the spirit of the English constitution, which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies, every part of the Empire, even down to the minutest member.'1 Nothing can be truer. But it hardly bespeaks much faith in this spirit of the constitution to deny, as in effect Burke passionately denies, that it might clothe itself in a better and less contracted form than the Old Whig constitution of the eighteenth century. (e) The Limitations of Burke's Political Ideal Nor is it easy to believe that, even for purposes of defence, this inflexible conservatism was the best resource against those radical and, as he thought, revolutionary ideals which it was the peculiar mission of his later years to deride and demolish. When a statesman finds himself face to face with ideals he detests, it is never enough to meet them by criticism and invective. Even when ideals may be false and fanatical, they will seldom, if they have once found lodgment in the popular mind, be driven from the field till they are met by some rival ideal strong and attractive enough to oust them from their tenancy. The forward-struggling spirit of man, especially of masses of men chafing under obstructions, is not to be won by negations. So long as reason and imagina1 Speech on Conciliation with America. tion keep their hold on life, mankind will cleave to whatever plan or project seems to satisfy that craving for betterment which lies deep in, at any rate, all Western peoples. Hence the familiar remark-it is what Maine said of the 'broken-down theories' of Bentham and Rousseau-that ideals may survive long after their brains are out. They do survive, and they will continue to survive, if there be no counter-ideal to supersede them. It is here that Burke is lacking. One may not say that he has no ideal to offer; and indeed it has been said a hundred times that the constitution he worshipped was not the constitution as it was, but a glorified picture of it as it shaped itself in his soaring imagination. Nor is the reader to be envied who can rise from his pages without having found an ideal. But it is an ideal that has the defects of its qualities. For, when all is said, the political imagination of Burke spent its marvellous force almost wholly in two directions. In the one direction it conjured up with the vividness of actual vision the disasters which radical reforms, so easy to initiate, and so hard to control, might carry in their train in the other it lavished its powers in glorifying the present as a legacy of priceless practical value inherited from the ever-memorable past. The result is splendid, and it is an incomparably richer thing than the ideals of Rousseau or Paine or Price or Godwin. But it has limitations which these escaped. [As a gospel for his age, or for any age, it has the fatal defect that, in its rooted distrust of theories and theorists, it finds hardly any place for political ideals as serious attempts to forefigure the destinies of a people as not less Divinely willed than its eventful past history or present achievement. And, by consequence, it fails to touch the future with the reformer's hope and conviction of better days to come. 'The echoes of the past within his brain, The sunrise of the future on his face,' -they are both the attributes of all great statesmanship. But if the sunrise of the future ever irradiates the pages of Burke, it is all too quickly to be quenched, at best in the clouds that veil the incalculable future, and at worst in the incendiary smoke of revolutionary fires. It is this that leaves our gratitude not unmixed with regrets. For Burke is no ordinary statesman, from whom it is enough to expect, that, if he look beyond the present at all, he should see no further than the next practical step in advance. Nor is he to be judged as such. It would do him wrong being so majestical. He is a | political genius of the first order; and just because he is so great it is impossible to withhold from him the tribute of wishing for more than he has actually given. No one had it in him as he had to give his country a comprehensive and satisfying political ideal. He had the knowledge, the imagination, the experience; and, not least, he had the religious faith which, when it strikes alliance with the idealising spirit, makes all the difference between ideals that are but subjective dreams and ideals which are beliefs that nerve to action. Nor is the reader who has felt the power and fascination of his pages to be blamed if he falls to wondering how much of the strife and embitterment of the nineteenth century might have been averted, if this master in politics had given the reins to his imagination as freely and sympathetically in looking forward to posterity as in looking backward to ancestors. But it was not in that path he was to walk. Somehow, though not, as we have seen, without reasons, his faith failed him. It was strong enough to make the course of history divine, to consecrate the legacy of the past, to intensify the significance and the responsibilities of the present. But it could not inspire an ideal ✓ of constitutional and social progress. Perhaps,' he once remarked, with even more than his wonted distrust of thought divorced from actuality, 'the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time.' 1 The result is that we find in Burke's writings the presence of two things, and the absence of a third. We find an unfaltering faith in the presence of a 'Divine tactic' in the lives of men and nations. We find also an apologia such as has never been 1 Appeal. equalled, for the existing social and political system as it has come to be by the long toil of successive generations. What we do not find, and are fain to wish for, and most of all from a thinker to whom the happiness of the people was always paramount, is some encouragement for the hope that the 'stupendous Wisdom' which has done so much in the past, and even till now, will not fail to operate in the varieties of untried being through which the State, even the democratic State, must pass in the vicissitudes and adventures of the future. 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