had slight respect for their ability to direct the affairs of state. "How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough and that glorieth in the goad; that driveth oxen and is occupied in their labours; and whose talk is of bullocks?" It was natural for Burke to doubt the ability of untrained and inexperienced minds to guide the ship of state with the skill of his practiced hand and with the efficiency which he had acquired only by long and thorough training. Such minds, in his opinion, could presume to leadership only on the principle that "fools rush in where angels fear to tread." The time is ripe to cease criticizing Burke as undemocratic in opposing the leadership of the masses, and recognize, as he did, that the brains, wisdom, and virtue of a nation should direct its course, realizing, as he did, that the principle of democracy may be administered in too large doses. He believed that "the science of government requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be." Burke's fame should rest secure on the exalted standards which he set for statesmanship in high attainments, sterling character, and lofty ideals.

His conceptions of liberty were no less clear and laudable than those on the relation of the people and their representatives. He loved "a manly, moral, regulated liberty" with wisdom and justice as its companions. He thought that all men who desire liberty deserve it, not as the reward of merit, or the acquisition of industry, but as their inheritance, "It is," he said, "the birthright of our species. We cannot forfeit our right to it, but by what forfeits our title to the privileges of our kind. I mean the abuse, or oblivion, of our rational faculties, and a ferocious indocility which makes us prompt to wrong and violence, destroys our social nature, and transforms us into something little better

than the description of wild beasts. To men so degraded, a state of strong constraint is a sort of necessary substitute for freedom, since, bad as it is, it may deliver them in some measure from the worst of all slavery,— that is, the despotism of their own blind and brutal passions. Of all the loose terms in the world, liberty is the most indefinite. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty, as if every man was to regulate the whole of his conduct by his own will. The liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which liberty is secured by the equality of restraint. A constitution of things in which the liberty of no one man, and no body of men, and no number of men, can find means to trespass on the liberty of any person, or any description of persons, in the society. This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice; ascertained by wise laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions. I am sure that liberty, so incorporated, and in a manner identified with justice, must be infinitely dear to every one who is capable of conceiving what it is. But whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is, in my opinion, safe."

If liberty with Burke was identical with justice, we can easily anticipate his regard for the right to property. Next to the abolition of religion, perhaps no act of the French revolutionists more stirred his wrath than their wholesale confiscation and spoliation of property. He held that the chief purpose for which government was instituted and continued was to give men security in the possession of the fruits of their labor or property lawfully acquired. "It is to the property of the citizen, and not to the demands of the creditor of the state," he said, "that the first and original faith of civil society is pledged." Even "that which might be wrong in the beginning, is consecrated by time and becomes lawful."

He believed that spoliation was contrary to the principles of the Christian religion; that as a man or trustee for men, he had no right to take vested property from one man and give it to another, because he happened to think the portion of one too great and that of another too small; that property and government fall together; and that "that fury which arises in the minds of men, on being stripped of their goods and turned out of their houses by acts of power, and our sympathy with them under such wrongs, are feelings implanted in us by our Creator, to be (under the direction of his laws) the means of our preservation. They arise out of instinctive principles of self-defence, and are executive powers under the legislation of nature, enforcing its first laws."

With Burke's character and most distinctive principles in mind it is not difficult to understand his position in the great causes in which he engaged. He was the apostle of order, and, in justice, we must add, of progress, but of progress by reform and not by radical innovation He stood by the English Constitution, regardless of its merits; he revered the past, present; and future, as a unity, the bonds of which cannot be broken with impunity.

Entering Parliament when the troubles with America were rapidly approaching their crisis, Burke lost no time in throwing himself into the cause of freedom against an incompetent king and a tyrannic House of Commons, nor in thoroughly preparing himself for an intelligent, consistent' course of action. He stood, as ever, firmly for the Constitution, defective though it was in some respects, and for the long established and dearly bought rights of Englishmen, whether in America or Middlesex, and was unalterably opposed to the high-handed and arbitrary methods which prevailed in the House of Commons from 1760 to 1783. The war in all its turns,

English defeat or victory, was for him only tragedy, and could have only a tragic outcome-the loss of the American colonies or of British freedom. Lord Morley has well said that "Burke's attitude in this great contest is that part of his history about the majestic and noble wisdom of which there can be least dispute." The Speech on American Taxation (1774), the Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies (1775), and the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777) are the enduring monuments of his heroic efforts in this cause. We know of nothing better of their kind. In the philosophy and method of sound statesmanship, in clear-cut logic and reason, in style rhetorical and ornate, yet lucid and effective, and in the perfect ordering of a vast wealth of material, these works are masterpieces.

In 1780 Burke made his great effort to purge the House of Commons of the corruption that had long impaired its efficiency. The attempt was heroic, the measures were severe and sweeping, and his success was large, though far less than what he sought.

During the fourteen years from 1781 to 1795 Burke gave the best of his energies to the impeachment of Warren Hastings, though he was also interested for a greater part of the time in the French Revolution. After the evidence and interest had needlessly been subjected to six years of cooling off in the House of Lords, the trial resulted in an acquittal; yet Burke regarded his labors in the case as the most important in his life. "If I were to call for a reward," he said, "it would be for the services in which for fourteen years, without intermission, I have showed the most industry and had the least success. I mean the affairs of India; they are those on which I value myself most; most for the importance; most for the labor; most for the judgment; most for the consistency and perseverance in the pur

suit. Let my endeavours to save the nation from that shame and guilt be my monument; the only one I ever will have. Let everything I have done, said or written, be forgotten, but this. I have struggled with the great and the little on this point during the greater part of my active life.”

Though Burke lost the case he won the cause. The miseries of India were henceforth alleviated; the policies of England in colonial government were opportunely corrected; and the interests of humanity could never again suffer in the same manner. Burke had builded better than he knew, or, sad to say, better than he lived to know, for in 1796 and probably to the end of his life he believed the matter had "ended in a manner fatal to the interests of mankind, and to the very existence of law; ruinous to the interests, and completely disgraceful to the honour and justice of the nation which might have been expected to furnish shining examples of regard to law, to equity, to morality, as well as a marked hatred of corruption, tyranny, and oppression."

While the trial of Hastings was still absorbing his time and energies, he began to observe with interest the growth and development of the French Revolution. From the beginning his impressions were tempered with caution and mistrust, for as early as 1773 his personal observations while he was in France did not please him, So far as we know, he never gave the cause the slightest approval, much less changed from an enthusiast to a conservative, as did Wordsworth, Coleridge, and many another. "From the moment the true genius of this French Revolution began to dawn upon my mind," he wrote in 1797, "I comprehended what it would be in its meridian." While many were giving vent to immature and ill-timed praise of that great social and political upheaval, Burke, skeptical and inclined to oppose and con